Re: inkjet negs

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Ender100@aol.com
Date: 07/31/03-10:56:26 PM Z


Sandy,

This time of year in South Carolina, I'd be very careful about going
"RAW".... with all the poison ivy and critters down there you might need Dick's
Mesquite Gum for more than making images.

On the serious side regarding RAW files:

I sometimes shoot with a Nikon D1X, which has RAW capabilities.

First, I never shoot in JPEG format—you lose a lot with JPEG compression.

Second, TIFF files take up much room on your compact flash cards—I think it
is around 15 Megs each. A compressed RAW file (its a lossless compression in
NEF format, which is Nikon's proprietary RAW format.) only takes up 3 Megs.

Third, the cool thing about RAW format is that when you import them into
Photoshop, they also contain what is called EXIF data—all the info about the
camera settings. It even tells you the date and time of the shot, the lens you
used, the f-stop & shutter speed, what zoom setting you used on the lens,
whether you turned on image stabilisation on a lens that has it, and other camera
settings such as sharpening, contrast, etc. Thus, think of it as the raw image
data (just like scanning with no adjustments applied) with none of the camera
settings applied to it. In the camera, the thumbnail you see on the little
screen is shown with the settings applied—plus you have a histogram of the
image. When you import the image into Photoshop or some of the Nikon software,
you get access to all the camera settings—so if you made any error, you can
apply any of the settings you want, modify them, not use them or whatever. Its
like getting a reprieve on each shot before the pellets drop in the bucket at
midnight.

By the way, I always turn off sharpening and contrast when I am shooting.
That is much better done in Photoshop and you get a longer tonal range and less
chance of highlights sucking.

So I usually shoot to get as rich of a histogram as I can—full tonal range
without blowing out the highlights and then, of course, the image is in 16 bit
color, so it is very rich in tonality. I can tell right away from the
histogram of the shot on the camera. If there is an extreme contrast range in the
shot, I can put the camera on a tripod and shoot two images-one for the
highlights and one for the shadows and then combine the two in Photoshop and blend
the best of both shots.

Also an interesting little quirk of the D1X is the fact that RAW files allow
you to do something else with the image. Normally D1X images are
interpolated DOWN by the software to get 6 Megapixel images. However, with RAW you have
the option to interpolate the narrow side UP and get around a 10-11 megapixel
image. This is sort of like the scanning companies screwing with the
stepper motors to get that higher scanning resolution. But it works and since you
are only interpolating in one direction, it doesn't look bad at all and its a
much bigger file.

There...that's almost all I know about RAW and my digits are raw so I will
stop here before everyone falls asleep.

Mark Nelson

In a message dated 7/31/03 10:19:29 PM, sanking@clemson.edu writes:

>
> OK, why should I want to go RAW? What are the advantages of RAW over TIFF?
>
>
>
>
> Sandy King
>
>
>
>


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