Help/advice with using RAW

[parish]

Went out for a walk yesterday and fired off a few shots with the camera set to RAW+JPEG to have my first dabble with RAW files.

I'm using digikam on Unix and have got the ICC profile for my camera (EOS 400D) and, to be honest, I'm not impressed with my efforts so far.

I guess I expecting too much - a "Wow, that's so much better than JPEG" reaction - but it has become obvious that it requires more user input into the conversion process which, I suppose, requires skill and an idea of what you are trying to achieve.

I've uploaded the RAW and (from camera) JPEGs to my website and the PNG output files from my attempts at RAW conversion so would someone experienced working with RAW files be willing to take a look and convert the RAW files to show me what can be achieved and give me some pointers at what I should be looking for when converting.

Needless to say the RAW files (and the PNG) are ~14MB each

http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0864.cr2
http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0864.jpg
http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0864.png

http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0872.cr2
http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0872.jpg
http://www.magichamster.com/raw/img_0872.png

Small versions of the photos (from-camera JPEGs) - please feel free to critique them

 

[Flash In The Pan]

RAW files are, in effect, digital negatives, so they need processed, just like a film negative. JPEG files, by contrast, have already been processed to some extent in-camera.

The RAW file contains every bit of information captured by the sensor, whereas the jpeg file contains only that which the camera considers essential to produce a reasonable facsimilie of what you saw through the viewfinder.

The vast amount of extra information contained in a RAW file allows detail to be recovered from shadows and highlight areas that would be completely lost in an in-camera produced jpeg as well as a multitude of other adjustments which can ultimately lead to the production of a far more complete image, even from a base image that, had it been shot in jpeg, would have been discarded as unuseable.

 

[tdodd]

I processed your raw files through DPP, Lightroom and Photoshop, with minimal alteration in either editor. Here are the results. To my eye there is no doubt that each conversion is clearly different.

I don't know how you resized the images you posted but they look very soft and the colours seem a bit different - not necessarily worse, just different.

FWIW it looks to me like your focus was too deep into the wheat field and you should have focused closer. There is a mass of detail in that corn but for the stuff that is farther away you can't really see it in such a small photo. However, for the wheat that is closer to the viewer, the detail is there to be seen in real life but you do not appear to have captured it fully. The wheat that is about in the centre of the image seems to me to be sharpest when viewed close up, but that sharpness is wasted on the reduced size image.

DPP

Lightroom

Photoshop

DPP

Lightroom

Photoshop

 

[Slapo]

I'm not sure whether anyone else is going to like them, but here they are.

 

[parish]

First guys, apologies for the slow reply but I hadn't realized that TP doesn't do e-mail notifications by default (so I thought everyone was ignoring me )

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. It seems that I hadn't quite grasped what RAW was all about and was expecting the RAW convertors to do more "magic" in sorting out the highlights and shadows - i.e. automatically fixing under-/over-exposed areas. tdodd's rework of the landscape shot illustrates that - the sky is still well over-exposed.

I now realize that you still have to do that yourself but that the RAW convertors allow you to fix overall under-/over-exposure, WB, etc. and that because no data had been lost due to (in-camera) JPEG compression the results of editing will be better, e.g. less noise when under-exposed areas are lifted.

Also, I hadn't configured the RAW convertor in Digikam properly so the images were very dark which didn't help - I've since installed the UFRaw plug-in for GIMP which is much better.

Slapo - I actually quite like those although, on balance, they are a bit oversaturated.

Thanks for your help