Now your images are on your hard drive and you are faced with hundreds of shots - many very similar to each other due to the joy of 'free' digital shooting - you have a problem.
Thsi problem faces all digital photographers - what should I keep and what should I delete? Which images are worth keeping just in case but aren't really worth spending a lot of time working on for display?
It can be an overwhelming task and as such is often just left undone, your hard drive gradually filling up with unlooked at rubbish, the good shots drowning in a sea of mediocrity, lost forever.
This is where the tools within Lightroom 2 really show their power. Lightroom has been designed to make sorting your images as easy and quick as possible.
I have developed a routine which is fast and helps me focus on those images that are worth developing. It gets rid of the dross and those images which are so similar in exposure they can hardly be told apart. Here's how I do it.
At the bottom of the LR screen, just above the filmstrip where all your just uploaded images are displayed, is a set of tools beside the word 'Filter'.
The first set are flags, of which there are three. 'Picks', 'Unflagged' and 'Rejected'. I click on the first image in the filmstrip and then press the 'E' key (this turns on 'Loupe View' which shows just one large image at a time in the central area of the screen) then I click on the 'picks' and 'unflagged' icons. Nothing will happen at this stage.
I then press ctrl, shift and tab at once - this hides all the toolbars and makes the image large on your screen.
Then I press the 'L' key twice - this 'dims the lights' - your screen will go black except for the image you are viewing - it helps get rid of on-screen distractions and lets you focus on each image in turn.
Then I look at the image. If I want to keep it I press the 'P' key (marking it as a pick). I also press a number on the keyboard from 1 to 5. I use 3 to mark an image to keep but one that may get deleted later - a 'keep it just in case' image. I press 4 if I feel it is a really good image and I will probably develop it for display and use. I only mark an image as 5 star when I have developed it later and it is one of my absolute best images - it has to be very good to get 5 stars. Once I have graded the image in this way I press the right pointing arrow key to move to the next image in the filmstrip.
If I don't want the image, if it is blurred, poorly exposed or composed, or I have another image which is identical but better in some way, I press the 'X' key. The image will disappear and the next image in the filmstrip will be displayed. However, don't worry, it has not been deleted from the hard drive at this point so you can go back to it if you have made a mistake.
If you have several images taken as bracketed shots or very similar in composition you cam use the left and right arrow keys to flick between them to make your choice as to which one(s) to mark as 'picks' or 'rejects'. If you want to see two images side by side press the 'L' key once to light up the display again to reveal LR (and press ctrl, shift and tab to bring back the toolbars) then holding the shift key down select two image syou want to look at side by side in the filmstrip and then click the 'XY' icon just above the filmstrip - this will show them side by side and clicking the 'XY' icon several times will cycle through a series of clever display options to help you compare them.
Once you have gone through all your images, marking them as picks or rejects, click the 'rejected' flag and click the unflagged and picks flags (so that now only the rejected flag is active). This will show on the filmstrip all the rejected photos only. You can now click the first image in the filmstrip, hold the shift key down and click the last photo and right click on an image and select 'delete'. You will be asked if you wish to just remove the images from LR or delete the original files frm the hard drive also (I select this second option), click OK and all your rejected files will be gone forever.
Now click back on the 'picks' flag and you will be shown all the selected images. I then click on the fourth star beside the flags and this will then show you just the four star picks you graded earlier. Now you are focused on just your very best images from the shoot and you can work on these.
I hope this has proved helpful - if you have any questions, please go ahead an ask me in the comments section and I will do all I can to help
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Grey Mares Rock, Embleton Bay
No time today to continue my workflow series so just a quick tip.
If it is windy or the ground is soft (I had both this morning on Bamburgh beach) push your tripod into the ground for extra stability. Yesterday I was doing long exposures on a beach and didn't do this - the result? Blurred shots due to the tripod sinking a few mm into the sand during the exposure - lesson learnt!
If it is windy or the ground is soft (I had both this morning on Bamburgh beach) push your tripod into the ground for extra stability. Yesterday I was doing long exposures on a beach and didn't do this - the result? Blurred shots due to the tripod sinking a few mm into the sand during the exposure - lesson learnt!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Digital Workflow, part 2
Yesterday, I started my series of blogs on digital workflow. If you missed it, it may be best to go back and read that first.
So, you have had a great time out shooting and are back home with a bag of memory cards full of... well, who knows what. Our hope is always that we have those killer shots that capture our subject to perfection and in our rush to see what we have we often just dive in to copying the images to the computer as quickly as possible.
However, it is better to be a bit more methodical and just do one or two things first to save loads of time later.
There are many bits of software out there that photographers download their images into. Some are plain rubbish, others are sophisticated enough to satisfy the National Archives. We pays our money and takes our choice.
My program of choice is Adobe Lightroom 2. Why do I use this and trust my images to it?
1. It is made by Adobe and integrates superbly with Adobe Photoshop.
2. It handles RAW files really well and saves me having to open the file in a RAW processor first and then import it into another program. I can do most of my image adjustments in Lightroom.
3. It is not just an image processing program. Lightroom is a massively powerful indexing system. If you get your workflow right you should never lose an image again. Lets face it, it is easy to find an image we want a few days or weeks after a shoot. But after several years of feverish shooting building up a library of many thousands of images and you suddenly need to find a shot of a particular person/bird/location or whatever, how do you do it in a couple of seconds without a program like Lightroom? It has saved my life on many occasions.
4. Lightroom also has wonderful export abilities - creating pdf slideshows, templates for fine printing and the ability to save just about any favorite settings as pre-sets to apply in an instant to future images.
5. It is brilliant at processing images in batches. If you do a shoot and have 100 images where the white balance needs correcting on them all, just correct one image and it will apply that change to the remaining 99 in a second or two. It takes much of the tedium out of image processing.
I could go on, I am a bit of a Lightroom evangelist!
So, back to workflow. You are back at your desk. Computer booted, coffee at the ready and a pile of memory cards to explore. Whats next?
When you insert the memory card in the reader, Lightroom opens and gives you a number of options. This is what I choose as part of my workflow (see the screenshot above);
In the 'File Handling' drop down box, I select 'copy as digital negative (DNG) and add to catalogue'. By selecting this the RAW format used by your camera is converted to Adobe's universal RAW format. Some photographers are concerned that RAW formats vary so much and are updated so often that the time may come when their older images may no longer be able to be opened (how many people have huge video tape collections that may soon be unusable due to the demise of the video recorder? And yet photographs are a bigger issue. Videos can usually be bought as DVD's, however our images are unique an irreplaceable).
To remedy this Adobe has created a universal RAW format that they have vowed to maintain forever. I have chosen to go with them. You can read more about it in this Adobe pdf - http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/pdfs/DNG_primer_manufacturers.pdf - you have to make your own choice.
The next option allows you to specify the folder you want the images to be put into on a hard drive. I select 'My Pictures'. Lightroom then creates a folder in 'My Pictures' named with the year. In that folder it creates a folder for the day the images were taken in such a way that the folders are in date order with January 1st at the top down to December 31st at the bottom. See below.
In the options box I also select the 'back up to' option and select a location on one of my external hard drives. This makes a copy of the images for you so if one hard drive fails, they are still on another. It is only after Lightroom has copied the images from my memory card to these two different hard drives that I will consider formatting the memory card.
The options box also allows you to use a filename template. There are several options in the drop down box. I use 'Filename-Date'. This uses the filename given to the image by the camera and adds the date in front, which I find useful. You can create custom names, names that give you 'image 1 of 45' type formats and so on. There will be one that suits you.
I also use the metadata template. Metadata is information embedded digitally in the file. You can't see it when you view the image but with a program like Lightroom you can read it. It holds information embedded by the camera at the time of the shot like the time, date, lens type, lens and exposure settings and so on. With Lightroom you can add more metadata that you find useful. I, for example, add my name and copyright information along with my web address so that buyers can have no excuse for not approaching me to use an image of mine.
The final option I use here and maybe the most important is the adding of keywords. This is the boring bit that many photographers skip. You need to type in all the words you may need to find these images in future years. Words about the location, names of people in the shots, the season, if it is dawn, dusk, or a macro shot and so on. It is better to add too many keywords than not enough.
Lightroom helps in this because it lets you create keyword templates which give you sets of keywords you can quickly apply to an image and then add any specific ones afterwards. You can also add keywords to specific images later if you need to. I am so pleased I have done this diligently for years as now when a customer approaches me to ask if I have a panorama of Durdule Door taken at dawn in the spring I can check in seconds. I have sold many images as a result of my careful keywording - even though I find it boring and it irritates the life out of me!
Now I click 'ok' and let Lightroom copy the images over to my hard drives.
In the next article I will outline how Lightroom then helps me to sort and categorise my images quickly and easily, helping me focus on the gems I want to spend time processing.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Workflow part 1
As promised here is the first blog in a series about workflow.
Many of my students struggle to get a pattern of working with their images. Yet, this way of working with a methodical system really pays off. Images are easy to find, your processing system helps you develop your own style, your images are always backed up safely and best of all you spend less time in front of the computer working on images and more time out making images, which has got to be a good thing.
So, the first step in developing your own workflow is this. Realise the workflow must be yours - tailored to you and what you want to achieve. I will describe how I work and this way meets my needs but you will see things I do that you don't need or want to do. You will also have ideas about things you want to add in to your workflow that I have no need of - so make the workflow work for you.
Next, many photographers don't think about workflow until they get home in front of the computer. Much better to think of workflow starting on location. Getting the image right 'in-camera' is an essential part of an efficient workflow. If you take the view that you can correct the exposure, clone out unwanted items, crop in tighter and so on, later, you are just making work for your self.
On location think about moving the camera closer rather than cropping later. Rather than removing objects in software why not change your angle of view or composition when shooting. it can't always be done, but if it can it is so much easier than doing it later.
Work on nailing the exposure, use ND Grads rather than having to blend multiple exposures later. I view all of this as part of my workflow.
If you are doing a long shoot - a wedding perhaps or spending a day out doing landscapes or photographing a city - consider not filling your memory cards. Yes, you may be able to get hundreds of shots on an 8 gigabyte CF or SD card and they are much cheaper now. However, all memory cards WILL one day fail, sooner or later. How much better to have a few smaller capacity cards and only part fill them. Then if one fails you haven't lost a days work. Or, as part of your workflow in the field use a portable backup drive to back up as you work - download the mornings cards to it while you have lunch or a drink. Take a laptop with you and copy images over to it as you work.
If you do this, still don't format the cards once you have copied them. save them as a back up till you get home. After all, ALL hard drives WILL one day fail. If you have copied your images to one then formatted the cards and it is the drive that chooses that day to fail, a days work is lost.
So, to recap.
1. You design your workflow to suit your needs
2. Get the image as right as possible in camera to save time later.
3. Use smaller capacity cards and spread the days shooting across many cards.
4. If you back up in the field, don't erase the cards just yet - keep them as a back up in case the hard drive fails.
In the next blog I will talk about what to do when you get home in front of the PC or MAC, all keen to see what you've got. Is that killer image there?
Many of my students struggle to get a pattern of working with their images. Yet, this way of working with a methodical system really pays off. Images are easy to find, your processing system helps you develop your own style, your images are always backed up safely and best of all you spend less time in front of the computer working on images and more time out making images, which has got to be a good thing.
So, the first step in developing your own workflow is this. Realise the workflow must be yours - tailored to you and what you want to achieve. I will describe how I work and this way meets my needs but you will see things I do that you don't need or want to do. You will also have ideas about things you want to add in to your workflow that I have no need of - so make the workflow work for you.
Next, many photographers don't think about workflow until they get home in front of the computer. Much better to think of workflow starting on location. Getting the image right 'in-camera' is an essential part of an efficient workflow. If you take the view that you can correct the exposure, clone out unwanted items, crop in tighter and so on, later, you are just making work for your self.
On location think about moving the camera closer rather than cropping later. Rather than removing objects in software why not change your angle of view or composition when shooting. it can't always be done, but if it can it is so much easier than doing it later.
Work on nailing the exposure, use ND Grads rather than having to blend multiple exposures later. I view all of this as part of my workflow.
If you are doing a long shoot - a wedding perhaps or spending a day out doing landscapes or photographing a city - consider not filling your memory cards. Yes, you may be able to get hundreds of shots on an 8 gigabyte CF or SD card and they are much cheaper now. However, all memory cards WILL one day fail, sooner or later. How much better to have a few smaller capacity cards and only part fill them. Then if one fails you haven't lost a days work. Or, as part of your workflow in the field use a portable backup drive to back up as you work - download the mornings cards to it while you have lunch or a drink. Take a laptop with you and copy images over to it as you work.
If you do this, still don't format the cards once you have copied them. save them as a back up till you get home. After all, ALL hard drives WILL one day fail. If you have copied your images to one then formatted the cards and it is the drive that chooses that day to fail, a days work is lost.
So, to recap.
1. You design your workflow to suit your needs
2. Get the image as right as possible in camera to save time later.
3. Use smaller capacity cards and spread the days shooting across many cards.
4. If you back up in the field, don't erase the cards just yet - keep them as a back up in case the hard drive fails.
In the next blog I will talk about what to do when you get home in front of the PC or MAC, all keen to see what you've got. Is that killer image there?
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Long Exposures for a Fine Art Image
I have admired the work of several photographers who have been using long exposures to get a fine art look to their images.
These long exposures seem to work well on seascapes - turning the sea into a satin mirror, capturing the movement in the clouds and altering colours to give a dreamy ethereal look.
This image was taken yesterday at Whitby. Not a dramatic dawn (you would have thought the sky would have obliged seeing as I crawled from my bed at 3am to get there in time)
Technique is so important to make these shots work. The shutter is open for so long that any shortcuts will spoil the results.
For this image I used a B&W 10 stop circular neutral density filter on my 24-70mm f2.8 L lens. Firstly, these strong ND filters seem very hard to get hold of. Mine took nearly three months to arrive from Warehouse Express - but the wait was worth it. I have heard them called 'Welders masks' because when you look through the viewfinder the image is almost totally black, so strong is the ND finish. In fact if you wait a few seconds and allow your eyes to adjust you can just begin to see the scene.
Usually it is best to pre-focus manually and set the shot up and then screw the filter on the lens before making the image.
So what is required to make a success of these shots?
1. A tripod is essential. This image had a two minute shutter speed (or should that be 'shutter slow'). Don't extend the centre column if the tripod has one as this is prone to vibrations. If you are standing on a jetty or even soft ground or sand beware moving around close to the tripod during the shot - I have spoiled images by disturbing the ground during and exposure. If the wind is blowing set the tripod as low as possible. Shelter it behind something. Place yourself in front of the tripod blocking the wind. Hang your camera bag from the tripod - the weight will help stabilise it. Do anything to get the tripod and camera as firm as possible as the slightest movement with spoil the image.
2. Set the camera on the lowest ISO you have - in my case ISO50 - to reduce noise. Unless, that is, you want to convert the image to black and white and have a grainy effect, in which case you can use a higher ISO to give a noisier image.
3. Working with the camera in manual set your aperture to f16 or f22. This gives good depth of field but also gives a long exposure.
4. Use the 'Bulb' setting on the camera - this works by keeping the shutter open as long as you press the shutter release. This means a remote shutter release with a lock setting is essential. If you don't use a remote release you have to keep your finger on the shutter button on the camera to hold it open throughout the shot and you can't prevent moving the camera, thus blurring the image.
5. Use mirror lock. This means the first time you press the shutter the mirror is lifted away from the sensor or film in the camera but the shutter does not open. Then you press the shutter again and lock it on the remote release. This prevents and shake caused by the mirror moving up to have dissipated - shake that might blur the image. This is one of those techniques of the perfectionist.
7. Even if you are using ND filters to slow the shutter speed, if there is a difference in light levels in the sky and foreground you will still need to balance this in the usual way with ND Grad filters.
8. Timing how long the shutter needs to be open is tricky. You are going beyond what the cameras light meter can tell you. A few test shots will soon show you how long the exposure needs to be. Check the histogram if you are shooting digitally and as usual try and get the histogram right over to, but not touching the right hand edge of the graph to ensure good dynamic range in the image.
9. Shoot in RAW if your camera supports this to give you the maximum control over processing the final image.
10. Have a stopwatch or watch with a second hand to time the exposures. My 1ds mk2 has a handy timer built in which is a boon. They ought to be standard on all cameras - but my old 5d mark 1 does not have one.
And that is all there is to it! You have to be prepared to be a perfectionist to make these images, but boy can they be worth it. There is something wonderful about the effect of time on the landscape - it gives a glimpse into a world we don't see with the human eye and although the images have a sense of calm about them they show how dynamic our world really is.
I hope you find this helpful. I haven't forgotten my series of blogs on workflow, I will be starting them shortly.
Have fun!
These long exposures seem to work well on seascapes - turning the sea into a satin mirror, capturing the movement in the clouds and altering colours to give a dreamy ethereal look.
This image was taken yesterday at Whitby. Not a dramatic dawn (you would have thought the sky would have obliged seeing as I crawled from my bed at 3am to get there in time)
Technique is so important to make these shots work. The shutter is open for so long that any shortcuts will spoil the results.
For this image I used a B&W 10 stop circular neutral density filter on my 24-70mm f2.8 L lens. Firstly, these strong ND filters seem very hard to get hold of. Mine took nearly three months to arrive from Warehouse Express - but the wait was worth it. I have heard them called 'Welders masks' because when you look through the viewfinder the image is almost totally black, so strong is the ND finish. In fact if you wait a few seconds and allow your eyes to adjust you can just begin to see the scene.
Usually it is best to pre-focus manually and set the shot up and then screw the filter on the lens before making the image.
So what is required to make a success of these shots?
1. A tripod is essential. This image had a two minute shutter speed (or should that be 'shutter slow'). Don't extend the centre column if the tripod has one as this is prone to vibrations. If you are standing on a jetty or even soft ground or sand beware moving around close to the tripod during the shot - I have spoiled images by disturbing the ground during and exposure. If the wind is blowing set the tripod as low as possible. Shelter it behind something. Place yourself in front of the tripod blocking the wind. Hang your camera bag from the tripod - the weight will help stabilise it. Do anything to get the tripod and camera as firm as possible as the slightest movement with spoil the image.
2. Set the camera on the lowest ISO you have - in my case ISO50 - to reduce noise. Unless, that is, you want to convert the image to black and white and have a grainy effect, in which case you can use a higher ISO to give a noisier image.
3. Working with the camera in manual set your aperture to f16 or f22. This gives good depth of field but also gives a long exposure.
4. Use the 'Bulb' setting on the camera - this works by keeping the shutter open as long as you press the shutter release. This means a remote shutter release with a lock setting is essential. If you don't use a remote release you have to keep your finger on the shutter button on the camera to hold it open throughout the shot and you can't prevent moving the camera, thus blurring the image.
5. Use mirror lock. This means the first time you press the shutter the mirror is lifted away from the sensor or film in the camera but the shutter does not open. Then you press the shutter again and lock it on the remote release. This prevents and shake caused by the mirror moving up to have dissipated - shake that might blur the image. This is one of those techniques of the perfectionist.
7. Even if you are using ND filters to slow the shutter speed, if there is a difference in light levels in the sky and foreground you will still need to balance this in the usual way with ND Grad filters.
8. Timing how long the shutter needs to be open is tricky. You are going beyond what the cameras light meter can tell you. A few test shots will soon show you how long the exposure needs to be. Check the histogram if you are shooting digitally and as usual try and get the histogram right over to, but not touching the right hand edge of the graph to ensure good dynamic range in the image.
9. Shoot in RAW if your camera supports this to give you the maximum control over processing the final image.
10. Have a stopwatch or watch with a second hand to time the exposures. My 1ds mk2 has a handy timer built in which is a boon. They ought to be standard on all cameras - but my old 5d mark 1 does not have one.
And that is all there is to it! You have to be prepared to be a perfectionist to make these images, but boy can they be worth it. There is something wonderful about the effect of time on the landscape - it gives a glimpse into a world we don't see with the human eye and although the images have a sense of calm about them they show how dynamic our world really is.
I hope you find this helpful. I haven't forgotten my series of blogs on workflow, I will be starting them shortly.
Have fun!
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Should I shoot in Jpeg of RAW?
The simple answer? RAW.
Why? Because RAW gives you massively more control over your images, it allows for much higher quality Jpegs to be created for printing, it allows for a much wider spectrum of colours to exist in the image so let's face it, why shoot in a format that gives you poorer quality final images? Why pay for a camera designed to work in RAW and not use it's full potential?
The main reason, is most photographers are a bit frightened of it. While they understand jpeg's, RAW sounds wierd, ferocious and complicated. After you have worked in it once or twice, you will realise this is not the case.
Some worry about hard drive space and memory card space because RAW files are bigger. But really, in a world where a 4Gig SD card costs just a few pounds/dollars/yen and when hard drives are enormous and a terabyte (that's a THOUSAND gigabytes!!!) drive can be had for less than a hundred pounds/dollars should space really be a worry?
You also need an additional piece of software to open RAW files to process them before you finish them off in Photoshop or Elements. This seems to put some off but it is just this piece of software that gives you incredible power over the image.
The software to read RAW files is provided on a CD with your camera. You can also use programs like Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture to work on them but I would recommend experimenting with the free manufacturers software first.
So what is a RAW file? A RAW file is simply a file that contains every single bit of information your camera captured when the shutter opened and closed. It truly is a digital negative. It is a 'lossless' format - it never loses any information the camera captured. In contrast, a Jpeg contains just a fraction of that information. For a start, it throws away half of the colours! That's why the files are smaller. Jpegs are a 'lossy' format. Every time you open a Jpeg and change something some more information is thrown away - the file gets smaller and smaller and the quality is reducing every time you work on it. Frightening!
As a RAW file has all this information embedded in it the software is then able to change the image in ways you can't change Jpegs. You can adjust the exposure by around 3 stops either way, for example - very useful if you under or over-exposed. It can help in pulling back detail in over-exposed areas. You can improve the colours selectively without over-saturating the image.
In addition to this, nothing you do to a RAW file can't be reveresed. In actual fact a RAW can't be changed. The changes you make are just recorded in the file and applied to it when you look at it. So any time you want to undo changes it can be done at a click of a button. Change a Jpeg and save the changes and it is impossible to go back.
So if you shoot in RAW you then process the image in the RAW software. Once happy you send it to Photoshop, Elements or your favorite image processor and make any final changes. You then save a copy of that image as a .psd or Jpeg ready to print, upload to the web or do whatever you want to do with it. The RAW file remains your digital negative you can go back to at any time - may be to make a black and white version for example.
So why not have a go. Load up the RAW conversion software Canon or Nikon gave you and do a shoot in RAW, then play. I guarantee you won't go back to Jpeg.
As a follow up to this, I am planning a series of blog posts on 'workflow'. This is the steps to follow from when you get home with that memory card bulging with wonderful images through downloading them, processing them, backing them up safely and printing them or uploading them to the web. Many photographers seem to struggle to get a workflow organised so I am going to talk through my workflow to see if this helps get you started.
Just a reminder too, I have launched my fully updated website at www.dougchinnery.co.uk and would welcome your feedback if you get a minute or two to have a look. Many thanks in anticipation
Why? Because RAW gives you massively more control over your images, it allows for much higher quality Jpegs to be created for printing, it allows for a much wider spectrum of colours to exist in the image so let's face it, why shoot in a format that gives you poorer quality final images? Why pay for a camera designed to work in RAW and not use it's full potential?
The main reason, is most photographers are a bit frightened of it. While they understand jpeg's, RAW sounds wierd, ferocious and complicated. After you have worked in it once or twice, you will realise this is not the case.
Some worry about hard drive space and memory card space because RAW files are bigger. But really, in a world where a 4Gig SD card costs just a few pounds/dollars/yen and when hard drives are enormous and a terabyte (that's a THOUSAND gigabytes!!!) drive can be had for less than a hundred pounds/dollars should space really be a worry?
You also need an additional piece of software to open RAW files to process them before you finish them off in Photoshop or Elements. This seems to put some off but it is just this piece of software that gives you incredible power over the image.
The software to read RAW files is provided on a CD with your camera. You can also use programs like Adobe Lightroom or Apple's Aperture to work on them but I would recommend experimenting with the free manufacturers software first.
So what is a RAW file? A RAW file is simply a file that contains every single bit of information your camera captured when the shutter opened and closed. It truly is a digital negative. It is a 'lossless' format - it never loses any information the camera captured. In contrast, a Jpeg contains just a fraction of that information. For a start, it throws away half of the colours! That's why the files are smaller. Jpegs are a 'lossy' format. Every time you open a Jpeg and change something some more information is thrown away - the file gets smaller and smaller and the quality is reducing every time you work on it. Frightening!
As a RAW file has all this information embedded in it the software is then able to change the image in ways you can't change Jpegs. You can adjust the exposure by around 3 stops either way, for example - very useful if you under or over-exposed. It can help in pulling back detail in over-exposed areas. You can improve the colours selectively without over-saturating the image.
In addition to this, nothing you do to a RAW file can't be reveresed. In actual fact a RAW can't be changed. The changes you make are just recorded in the file and applied to it when you look at it. So any time you want to undo changes it can be done at a click of a button. Change a Jpeg and save the changes and it is impossible to go back.
So if you shoot in RAW you then process the image in the RAW software. Once happy you send it to Photoshop, Elements or your favorite image processor and make any final changes. You then save a copy of that image as a .psd or Jpeg ready to print, upload to the web or do whatever you want to do with it. The RAW file remains your digital negative you can go back to at any time - may be to make a black and white version for example.
So why not have a go. Load up the RAW conversion software Canon or Nikon gave you and do a shoot in RAW, then play. I guarantee you won't go back to Jpeg.
As a follow up to this, I am planning a series of blog posts on 'workflow'. This is the steps to follow from when you get home with that memory card bulging with wonderful images through downloading them, processing them, backing them up safely and printing them or uploading them to the web. Many photographers seem to struggle to get a workflow organised so I am going to talk through my workflow to see if this helps get you started.
Just a reminder too, I have launched my fully updated website at www.dougchinnery.co.uk and would welcome your feedback if you get a minute or two to have a look. Many thanks in anticipation
Re-vamped website
Just a quick blog post for my regular readers.
I have done a complete re-vamp of my website at www.dougchinnery.co.uk and would welcome your comments on the new look and functionality, especially if you can find any snags or broken links.
I have tried to make it faster and more polished. I have also reduced the number of images to present just my favorite work. I post far more images on my Flickr stream, but some of those I don't want to put up on the main website.
So all feedback, good, bad and indifferent is much appreciated
I have done a complete re-vamp of my website at www.dougchinnery.co.uk and would welcome your comments on the new look and functionality, especially if you can find any snags or broken links.
I have tried to make it faster and more polished. I have also reduced the number of images to present just my favorite work. I post far more images on my Flickr stream, but some of those I don't want to put up on the main website.
So all feedback, good, bad and indifferent is much appreciated
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Fotoviva Image of the Month
I am very humbled to have had an image of mine selected as 'Photo of the Month' by the Fotoviva website - http://www.fotoviva.co.uk/news - this company sell high quality photographic art. You choose an image and size and decide whether to have it printed as a canvas, on acrylic or as a print to be framed and they do the rest.
They offer several of my images for sale along with some very fine work from other photographers from around the world - I highly recommend you take a look.
They offer several of my images for sale along with some very fine work from other photographers from around the world - I highly recommend you take a look.
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