Been playing around with my D3s and experimenting with bracketing. Like the idea of it taking shots at various exposures between shots without having to fiddle with settings. There isn't much point of it if shooting RAW if I am correct as you can adjust everything in PS. is it just useful for Jpeg shooters or am I missing the point?
Braketing and Raw
- Thread starter wazy15
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- Phil
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You are absolutely missing the point of bracketing.
Imagine a scene with deep shadows and a bright sky. You could take three shots in a row 2 stops apart in exposure.
If it so happened the middle one was spot-on, you might find the lowest exposure had lost all shadow detail and the highest had lost all sky detail. This missing detail would not be recoverable in raw.
Phil
Imagine a scene with deep shadows and a bright sky. You could take three shots in a row 2 stops apart in exposure.
If it so happened the middle one was spot-on, you might find the lowest exposure had lost all shadow detail and the highest had lost all sky detail. This missing detail would not be recoverable in raw.
Phil
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- Richard
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Yes. Bracketing is for when you are not sure what the best exposure is so you cover your options with a range of levels. Or for when you want to deliberately shoot above and below in order to combine two or more frames in post processing to extend the dynamic range (ie HDR).
The only difference between Raw and JPEG in this respect is that the Raw file will probably have a bit more headroom to recover slight over exposure, but not much (half to one stop max - that kind of level). If you rely on that and are sloppy with exposure setting you will not get the best out of the camera, and could come seriously unstuck.
The thing that you can adjust completely with Raw in PP is white balance.
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Depends on the scene but generally shooting RAW will give you more lattitude to extract information - its not just simply like a little bit of +/- EV, but its about being able to get far more information out of the darker parts of the scene. This is the massive difference that raw shooting can give you.
JPG is compressed - it throws away information considered "unimportant" and focuses on the main part of the picture - but RAW is exactly whatever the sensor received equally, so you get to decide at a later stage what is important and what isn't. The downside is that by default it can look very flat and dull, so you do need to learn to spend time developing and enhancing your pictures in post - colours, sharpness, contrast, etc - so if you just want to press the button and that's the end of it, shoot jpg.
JPG is compressed - it throws away information considered "unimportant" and focuses on the main part of the picture - but RAW is exactly whatever the sensor received equally, so you get to decide at a later stage what is important and what isn't. The downside is that by default it can look very flat and dull, so you do need to learn to spend time developing and enhancing your pictures in post - colours, sharpness, contrast, etc - so if you just want to press the button and that's the end of it, shoot jpg.