First, this is not a raw vs. jpeg opinion. This is just to share my amazement in the color that was hidden in the raw file. In December, I definitely knew I wanted a dream light castle to enlarge. So, I took lots of photos hoping one would work. I am a jpeg shooter and not a raw shooter. I just don’t want to spend the time processing all my shots, and I have had very good results enlarging my jpegs with no loss of sharpness or jpeg artifacts. With the castle dream lights, though, I thought I should take some in raw, to make sure the lights were as sharp as possible. In the end, I did not use any of my raw shots, and enlarged only jpeg shots. I wanted to share these two examples though. I am amazed at the color difference in these two photos. These photos were taken 30 seconds apart. Both are f8 1.8 sec exposures with -2/3 comp. The only difference is the raw color post processing. At full resolution, the raw is not any sharper than the jpeg unless you zoom in way too much. Before processing, the raw and jpeg looked identical. It is amazing though, the color that was hidden in the raw file. All I did was adjust the white balance. [This attachment has been purged. Older attachments are purged from time to time to conserve disk space. Please feel free to repost your image.]
Now you know the power of the dark side.....are you going to switch? (when you get used to it, you'll find a RAW converter that has batch capabilities and can go quickly)
I like the first one the colors are great. I want to shoot RAW but I don't have a software to process RAW files. what software do you recommend?
Nice work Craig. That's a good comparison showing the power of RAW. I was at a photography workshop last week in Yellowstone (I'll post some of those photos later this week) and they talked a lot about shooting in raw because of the ability to tweak the colors to make them what you saw. For example, on overcast days, snow has a slight blue tint to it. Our eyes correct the snow to make it look white (because we know its white) but the camera doesn't do that. The way to correct it is to shoot raw and adjust it in post-processing.
If have Nikon cameras, I recommend Nikon Capture NX. It greatly simplifies the color tweaking and white balance operations because of their "u point" system. You could do all of that in Photoshop with curves, but its so much easier in NX. I process all of the RAW files and correct white balance and color in Capture NX and then do my cropping, and finishing in Photoshop. Nikon has a trial of NX on their website. Its the full working version and I think its good for 30 days.
I recommend Bibble. Bibble is available in two flavors in Windows/Mac OS/Linux formats, and has a free 30 day trial full featured version. The founder created the software when the first generation Nikon dSLRs came out with RAW but didn't like the first generation RAW converters, so he wrote his own. www.bibblelabs.com
I'll try both and see which I like better I would like to be able to shoot RAW during a friends wedding in a few months.
strong advocate of raw and 3rd party convertor here, i use breezebrowser pro, check out the trial version, has batch capability, you can tag a bunch of similar photos, set up the download path you want, tweak the white balance and set use white balance for all, set a number of other options relating to sharpness, exposure comp, etc, then let it rip and if it's a lot, walk away for awhile, come back when finished baking i stick with breezebrowser because it was what i used in the early days of my d60, i got used to it, frankly the canon software was junk at the time, and i got too lazy to learn any others, easier to get the free upgrades when needed and just renew the license every couple of years, not too expensive as far as software goes, in the $69 range, and i've been a happy user
I have to ask if you're certain that the castle lights didn't change color in between shots. The icicle lights and the lighting on the castle itself are the same color in the jpeg, but they're different in the RAW. Changing color temperature shouldn't separate colors like that, that looks more to me like the castle lighting cycled a bit. I know you said they looked identical before processing, but.. I've just never known changing color temperature to alter colors in that way.
I think changing the color temperature has a great affect on the photo. Look at the lighting in Tomorrowland. There is a huge difference in the colors there in both shots.
-Roger, no I dont planning to raw at this time. I still like the overall convenience of jpeg. But, I might try it next time in difficult lighting. -I used acdsee pro to work on the image. -Dan, I'm sure the castle did not change during the exposure or between the two shots. If I could figure out how to upload the nef image to my site, I would, so that anyone could adjust the image as they wanted. -I dont think these two photos are that great anyway, I just was amazed at the color possibility from the raw file!
