Even More Creativity

Just a few hints on why it is beneficial to shoot RAW images, without actually getting deeply involved in the technicalities of the advantages of RAW over JPG. All I will say here is that the RAW image gives you much more to work with at the end of the day, although it gives a much bigger files size, ultimately less photos on your card, what you are actually getting is what the camera saw when you pressed the shutter.

For the last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with RAW images, and at first I was not convinced that the increased file size was worth the trouble especially as my graphics package would have nothing to do with the RAW image from my G9, and that despite maintaining that it would handle CR2 (the Canon RAW file extension) images. The ZoomBrowser software supplied by Canon is OK, but very limited, and I basically use it only to convert RAW images to JPG’s for uploading to post on my blogs. A few days ago I was lucky enough to get my grubby paws on a very reasonably priced copy of PhotoshopCS4, and this has made me change my mind about using RAW images, as Photoshop handles them brilliantly. Now I am by no means a Photoshop expert having only been using it for about four or five days, but I know what I want the final image to look like and just playing around with the settings one soon learns the basic techniques to improve the original image.

Now, the best thing to do is provide an example, so that you can see the difference for yourselves. What I did here was to take five shots of St. Giles Cathedral here in Edinburgh, ranging from two stops under exposed to two stops over exposed in one stop increments, with the specific idea of creating a High Dynamic Range, HDR, photograph (I will cover this whole technique in greater detail at some point). These are all RAW images simply converted to JPG with no tinkering whatever.

Two stops underexposed

One stop underexposed

Normal exposure

One stop overexposed

Two stops overexposed

Now I know a little about HDR photographs, which is, basically, a method of producing an image with a greater range of shadow and highlight details. As I say HDR requires a post all of its own, here I just want to highlight one of the possibilities of the RAW image.

So I loaded the five images into the HDR Merge facility of Photoshop and let it do all the hard work of aligning and merging the images together, and choosing the settings that it thought best for the image – these are NEVER to my satisfaction in any of the HDR software that I have tried. So, before saving the image I go in and adjust four of the settings to produce a photo to my own exacting standards. The four adjustments I make are to the Brightness, Contrast, Vibrance and the Saturation, and sometimes, if needed, I sharpen the image a little; but it rarely seems to need it from the RAW image. Only then do I save the resulting image as a .jpg file for uploading to various places, either to post on a blog or to a stock photo website. The beauty is that you still have the RAW images in their pristine unchanged form and can come back to them time and again to produce something different from the original. The problem with JPG’s is that every time you save the image you lose a little of its quality.

The final result well take a look for yourselves:-

The normal image shot as a JPG file

The HDR image converted from the RAW images and saved as a JPG

I don’t think it takes a genius to see the difference in the two photos, especially if you click on them and compare the larger images. This is just one of the many benefits of shooting RAW images; but, for me, the main reason is that I am not in any way changing the originally shot image, and it is always there for me to come back to and re-work in any manner that takes my fancy.