Thanks David. This was shot at about one in the afternoon under hazy sun. However, the snow was quite bright, brighter in fact, than it appears in the photo. I think a jpeg would have blown out highlights and lost shadow detail if it was exposed the same as this shot. The key to RAW is in how you convert it. I have a book devoted to the RAW converter. I don't have it here with me at work, but I can supply the name of it later if anyone is interested. The author goes to great lengths in explaining how a shot can be dialed in using exposure, shadow, brightness and contrast. What it amounts to is that you expose to preserve any highlights that are critical. Then when processing the RAW image, you adjust the exposure slider so that all your critical highlights are in range. If you hold down the alt/option key while moving the slider, the highlights that are out of range will be revealed as bright areas against black. Then you adjust for shadow. Again, if you hold down the alt/o! ption key while moving the shadow slider all the shadow areas that are out of range will be revealed as bright against black. After that, you adjust your midtone levels with the brightness control. Adding brightness in the raw converter won't affect the highlights. It's not the same as brightness in PhotoShop. Finally, you adjust contrast. This will pull the histogram toward the ends of the scale of push them toward the middle. Again, it's different than the contrast control in PhotoShop. It's more like tweaking the rgb curve. Of course there are other factors to consider such as color temperture, hue, sharpness, etc. But these don't affect shadow or highlight rendition. Best of all, the RAW converter is a lot of fun. It's a great tool for the digital photographer. Paul
> Good highlight and shadow detail, I would be happy with those results. > But > this was not done at most contrasty time of the > day, right ? Do you think that jpg would remove some of the hightlight > detail > or it makes a difference only in shadows ? You have > some realy nice pictures on photo.net by the way. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <pentax-discuss@pdml.net> > Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 11:58 AM > Subject: Re: Hmm.. ist DS competition? > > > > The big limitation in shooting jpegs is that you don't have the exposure > control that you get when converting RAW in PSCS. There > is no comparison between jpeg and RAW. It's like night and day. Here's a shot > I > did yesterday to test the 28/3.5 for another member. > It includes snow in bright sun and heavy shadow under a bench. You'll find > detail in the snow and plenty of information in the > sahdow. It was shot in RAW, and processed in PSCS. A bit of additional > adjustment was done with the Shadow/Highlight tool in PS > after conversion. There isn't a slide film in the world that can give you > that > much latitude, and I would guess that you'd have to > scan a negative film and post-process to get a comparable result. But that's > my > opinion. Others may differ. Here's the shot, which > is quite ugly by the way :-). > > http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=3155206 > > > > > > > > If you are shooting jpegs, you are limiting things somewhat. > > > > I also don't think digital has the latitude that film does, but I bow > > > > to the knowledge of those who disagree with me on it. > > > > > > Shooting jpegs limits some shadow detail but that "detail" is mostly > > > noise > in my > > > opinion. > > > > > >
