James,
Thanks for your good tip to the article. It presents a most convincing case, to me at least, for RAW with exceptions for going with JPG. My concern has always been for the RAW’s large files requiring large numbers of flash cards. I don’t have a labtop, and I have not seen any positive review on the dependability of a Portable Hard Drive. The author’s PHD must have worked for him to entrust his field images to it. This revelation certainly throws a different light on digital films.
BTW, there is an excellent image of a hight shot by Michael Reichmann that’s really informative. The camera is the new Sony F828. I looked at it in a slightly larger magnification and didn’t see any halos or noice in the unifrom or dark areas. The camera must be quite capable, or the photographer is wizard with Photoshop, or my vision is a lot worse than I expect. 🙂
Shan
I’m glad you enjoyed the article Shan. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW because of my overwhelming ability to screw up a good shot. It is much easier to salvage a photo shot in RAW than in any other format. I think the Sony 828 is an excellent camera if you use it within it’s capabilities as with any camera.
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Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ <
James,
Although my Canon G2 can shoot in RAW, I’ve yet to use it because it won’t open in Elements. But I have been frustrated with the blown highlights just like I had with slides. If RAW can provide an after the event way out, I think I’ll have to consider upping my flash card capacities to hold the larger files. Or wait until a more dependable stand-alone Portable Hard Drive is availble with builtin error detection. It would be tragic to erase the flash card and then discover the images uploaded to the PHD are corrupted.
I handled the Sony 828 in a camera store and found it kind of heavy and awkward to hold. Twisting the camera body while grabbing the barrel of the lens does not come natural to me. But then, it’s a Zeiss lens. Guess it’s another item for bookmark.
Shan
Shan I think if you ever start shooting RAW you would never look back. While you can make adjustments in any format I find you have much more latitude in RAW. CF cards are getting so inexpensive these days it’s not hard to acquire enough storage.
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Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/
I have been shooting RAW for sometime now, and have been putting up with hard to use, pain in the butt programs to convert my images. Simply because I want the LACK of LOST DATA I get with RAW. I just wanted to thank jhjl1 for posting that link.
I down loaded the free trial of the LE version, and well, all I can say is that it is simply amazing!! The simplicity of the program is great, and the batch processing is so simple a child could do it. After fooling around with it for only 2 days..I gladly sent them my money. 🙂 Life is just to short to be without this program if you shoot in RAW, and love it as I do.
I am not saying I agree with everything in the article, but I sure love that program!! 🙂 I would not say that someone that didn’t buy a portable $200 hard drive to download their cards to are idiots for example. As many of us know that what is often said to be downloaded onto them, is not always the case. And that can be a VERY costly experience if your doing a paid shoot…(both monetary, and in reputation as well.) So I will still lug my lap top and card reader around to save my images on, (until I can force myself to cough up the $700 or so, that a good dependable portable hard drive, with a built in viewer on it costs.) So I can be SURE of the image transfers, before dumping the contents of my flash cards.
I can’t believe I had not found that program before, thank you again for posting it. 🙂 Gary~*
I had to go back and see what program was mentioned in the article. I just felt it was a good article on the merits of shooting RAW. After rereading the article I see the program you are referring to. I do use a version of that program for the majority of my conversions and find it to be excellent. I also agree with you on the portable hard drive. I currently have just two 256 cards and I carry my laptop with me for storage. Glad you found the link helpful.
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Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/
Gary, I would have supported your laptop approach very vocally….until my laptop hard drive started to fail this week. I have it running now – but it was dead all day. There’s just no sure thing, I guess. Right now, while it’s still running, I’m burning a CD, filling a 256 MB flash drive, and only selectively erasing images from the CF cards I brought along. My new best friends at Dell may be selling me the third computer I’ve bought in the last 12 months….(the other two were for the kid in college and the kid starting her teaching career….)
Chuck,
Been meaning to ask you. Was it you who had a kind of portable storage thing for stashing images from flash cards?
Shan
Thanks – James great articles
beth
Jodi,
Actually I was thinking of the kind like the "Digital Wallet" or "Mindstor". They are stand-alone card reader and hard drive combination that can work without a computor. Some has slots for up to six different kinds of flash cards and a little biddy screen for reviewing stored images. Found several kinds by Googling, and a couple of them are here;
-http://www.peddlerstore.com/cgi-bin/miva.cgi? Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=DW20
-http://secure.serverlab.net/shop/merchant.mvc? Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=T00107&Category_Code=SixPac
If they are reliable and can do error detection, a 20 GB small package for, say, $200~$300 would surely be more convenient and less expensive in having a stack of cards to give the same capacity. Just an idle thought. 🙂
Shan
I’ve been shooting in RAW ever since I had someone try to help me rescue a great shot of my husband and son flying a kite at the beach and was told.. if only you had shot this in RAW. I don’t claim to have the skills at this point to fully take advantage of the RAW format nor the software to make the process easier, but I do have hope.
Here’s my dilemma. We’re taking the boys (ages 3 and 5) to Disney at the end of March. I can bring a laptop along to download my picts in the evening, but on 1 or two days of the trip it would mean the laptop would spend the day in the car in the hot Florida sun. Any suggestions? I’ve thought about shooting JPG for this trip to get more images onto my cards but then would regret if any of my shots could have benefited from RAW. Right now a 512MB card from Staples (on sale this week for 89.95 after rebate) is looking pretty good.
I’d be interesting in hearing what others do.
Thanks,
Barb
I have stored my laptop in a sealed bag within an ice chest with blue ice and had no ill effects. Of course this only takes care of the heat but you still have to worry about theft.
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Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ the laptop would spend the day in the car in the hot Florida sun. Any suggestions?
Barb,
I try to enjoy the trips that I take and not be a slave to technology. Just came back from a trip, have pictures on cards, shot in JPEG, loaded on my hard drive after I came home. None of mine will be exhibited in the Louvre. I took most @ 2288×1520 resolution, some @ 2288×1820. Trying to be pragmatic. I bought an additional card from B&H before the trip.
Ken
thanks for posting this interesting topic…..both made interesting reading!
I try to enjoy the trips that I take and not be a slave to technology.
Ken,
Boy, that comment really hit home with me! We travel a lot, and I love to take travel pix, but I try not to let the photography dominate the experiences. When I find that I’m more interested in getting a picture of something than I am in enjoying the scene, I try to just put the camera in my lap and forget about it!
Over the years, I’ve gone from one extreme to the other…a beast o f burden with bags full of lenses and tripods to NO CAMERA AT ALL! Now, I’m trying to strike a happy medium…bring home some nice memories AND some images that are fun to work on, but BEING THERE is much more important than any pictures I can take.
Bert
Regarding the RAW vs. JPEG arguments in the article, I would pick only one small nit…my Olympus E-20 allows me to turn off in-cam sharpening and contrast adjustments on JPEG and TIFF images. The writer implies that you have to accept the in-cam processing, and that may be true with some cameras, but not all.
As for the white balance and exposure settings, the camera seems to do as well as I could do. By the way, the E-20 comes with a RAW plugin for Photoshop which works fine. I’ve played with it…taken identical pictures in highest quality JPEG and RAW and blown them up in PS to compare…after processing both to adjust B&W points in each color channel with the Levels tool and sharpening with the USM. Simple corrections admittedlly, but I could see no discernable difference at 400% on the screen. I didn’t print them, but my printer will only do 8x10s max, and I’m quite sure the difference at that size would be undetectable.
Those were just snapshots I took in my backyard, not real "problem" images. There probably are some that could be improved if saved in RAW.
Bert
