On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 01:41 pm, Steve Climpson: Kevin Horton wrote
Those of you who shoot RAW may be interested in this new plug-in from Adobe I'm interested to hear from any users of Nikon D1X's on a mac who are using this plugin. My questions would be: Does it produce 10MP sized files (as per Bibble & Capture)? Is the colour interpretation any good? Both Bibble & Capture state that they have worked hard on getting the best colour off the chip. If the Adobe plugin works with so many cameras have compromises been made from brand to brand. Is it fast to open, work in & save out to psd or tiff files? As one of the beta testers who put Camera Raw through its paces, I can add some useful comments. Adobe Camera Raw for Photoshop 7 is major news! It makes all the difference to digital capture workflows as the plug-in enables you to work using raw captures without speed limitations. For too long now the camera manufacturers have plodded along, providing us with software that was poorly optimised and couldn't be of any use to serious professional photographers. Anyway, that's all in the past now and in my opinion once you start using Camera raw, you will never need to bother to load up your Nikon or Canon CDs etc. except where you require the software to intertact with the camera settings. If you check out the Adobe site links <http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html> you can learn more about the product. Officially, camera raw will support Canon, Fuji S2, Minolta Dimage, Nikon and Olympus cameras that are capable of producing raw files. Unofficially, it will support more, such as Kodak DCS cameras and I am sure there will be updates as new models come to market. Basically the plug-in has cracked the code to interpret the raw data from any of the above. Thomas Knoll has effectively profiled them. Using the white balance information either contained in the file data itself or a preset WB setting, the colour is further adjusted to produce an optimum colour result. It is amazing how much you can correct the colour from a bad raw 'digital negative' and yield a full histogram 16-bit file. Compare this to a high quality JPEG workflow, which is like taking your films to be processed by the chemist, throwing away the negs and scanning in the prints. Those who tested Camera Raw used all sorts of camera files. The general concensus from the experts is that Thomas Knoll (who knows a thing or two about pixels) has done a better job of interpreting the data. As I say, speed is the main attraction. How long does it take you to preview for example a Canon 1Ds file using Canon software, convert the file to a 16-bit TIFF and reopen that TIFF in Photoshop? Are we talking seconds or minutes here? It takes me slightly less than 10 seconds to do all this on my G4. And yes, you can do batch processing. So by that reckoning it would take about an hour to batch process between 300- 400 raw captures to 16-bit TIFFs. How long would this take to do using any other software? The Camera Raw dialog provides tone correction options for shadows, highlights and brightness and contrast. You can use these effectively and you have a live histogram option, but I prefer still to do this in Photoshop. Sharpening defaults to adding a small amount of sharpening, which most captures can benefit from, but you may prefer to reset to zero and do this in Photoshop. The smoothness setting is useful for removing digital camera noise commonly present when a high ISO capture setting is used. Camera raw automatically adjusts the smoothness setting according to the ISO setting read in from the file metadata. If you shoot professionally and your time is valuable, it is $99 well spent. Some of the camera manufacturers may feel piqued that Adobe have now come up with a better software solution, but in the long run I would rather see them spend their energies doing what they do best - creating excellent hardware and leave the pixel manipulation to the experts. Martin Evening Photography <www.martinevening.com> Co-listowner ProDIG discussion list <http://www.prodig.org> Author of Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for Photographers <www.photoshopforphotographers.com> =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
