Tommy Blogs (retired)

A couple of weeks ago, I read Ken
Rockwell’s essay where he denounces RAW as slow and unnecessary. I disagree
with him and have been planning to write something up myself, but Petteri
Sulonen beat me to it, and did a better job than I ever would have. If you have
any interest in shooting something other than JPEGs in your camera (or you want to
get some background to better appreciate some of the posts I write here), Petteri’s
essay is essential reading.

Ken essentially argues that RAW is unnecessary if you are a good enough photographer
to get things right in the camera. This is not my experience, especially for the D30.
My D30’s auto white balance has a blue cast at its best, and is way, way off
many times. Custom white balancing in-camera works some times, but it’s incredibly
tedious to do. I now just set the white balance to the closest approximation of the
light I’m in (I’ve found with the D30 that it helps some with the exposure
evaluation – I haven’t done carefully controlled tests, but it seems that
the evaluative metering does better if the white balance is set closer to the current
light source), take a shot of something white (the Styrofoam plate is back at the
top of my favorite list), and correct the white balance in CaptureOne DSLR. It’s
painless and very accurate.

Exposure is another area where I deliberately “get it wrong” in the camera
in order to improve the result at the other end. Most (all?) digital cameras have
a hard time with highlights that are on the verge of blowing out. The D30 has an especially
hard time with them. So I deliberately, consciously underexpose much of the time,
and then correct the exposure in CaptureOne. The results are leaps and bounds better
than I could get shooting JPEG.

I won’t even get into sharpening artifacts and the cruder in-camera de-mosaic
algorithms. Petteri does a very nice job explaining these things.

One area where I disagree with Petteri: 16 bits can make a difference. I didn’t
do much with 16-bit images until I got Photoshop CS because there wasn’t a lot
you could do with them in earlier versions of Photoshop. Yes, I know there
were some workarounds, but it was very painful. Petteri has written on DPReview that
he still uses Photoshop 6 – that’s likely the reason he thinks 16-bit
TIFFs are “overkill.”

The limitations of the 8-bit TIFFs didn’t show up much on screen, but in shadow
areas on prints I noticed some posterization. Thanks to the RAW originals, I have
gone back and redone the pictures as 16-bit TIFFs and those shadow areas are smooth,
smooth, smooth.

RAW advantage not mentioned elsewhere

There is another advantage of RAW that I haven’t seen mentioned much: rather
than seeing the RAW formats go obsolete, the tools for processing RAW files are getting
better.

I started shooting RAW with my D30 within a week of getting the camera and haven’t
gone back since. I started with BreezeBrowser, which
used (and still uses) the Canon SDK. There was no quality advantage with BreezeBrowser
in those days over the Canon converter, but its workflow was much better.

Then YarcPlus came out. I was able to do a few things with the linear conversion, Fred
Miranda’s D30 LP Batch Photoshop actions, and noise reduction that I couldn’t
with BreezeBrowser, but again that program used the Canon SDK. BreezeBrowser soon
responded with its own noise reduction technique and a combined exposure mode to extract
more dynamic range from the images.

Then, early last year, Adobe released their RAW Converter plug-in. It felt like nirvana.
The quality of my pictures improved enormously, and the workflow from ARC helped me
learn to do a better job with setting exposure and evaluating my histogram. Not only
did my existing RAW pictures get better, but I learned to do a better job behind the
camera. Two wins for a RAW conversion program.

After that, Phase One released Capture One DSLR
LE and I could afford to buy their system. The quality of my photographs improved
again, and the workflow got a lot easier.

I’ve seen further improvements from Magne
Nilsen’s profiles and the upgrade to Photoshop CS and a full 16-bit workflow.

I can go back today to pictures I took during that first month with the D30 and get
a much better photograph than I could the day I took it. That’s a huge advantage
to RAW.