Monday, December 18, 2006
Holiday Photo Workflow and Further Explorations in RAW Photo Shooting
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 10:00 AM
I'm back from my Hawaii vacation (a celebration of my 5-year wedding anniversary to the best woman in the world), and my primary reason for purchasing the Nikon D200 and lenses earlier this year was to maximize my photographic opportunities while in Hawaii. As such, I really "geared up" for the trip - I brought along all three of my lenses (18-200, 12-24, 50), two camera cases (a Lowepro SlingShot 200 AW and a Kata shoulder bag), the NEXTO CF OTG with an 80GB hard drive in it, and my laptop. I was supposed to bring along an 80 GB hard drive full of DVDs I had ripped (it's so much easier than carrying them along), but the day before I left the 80 GB Samsung hard drive failed on me. I ended up using my Toshiba Gigabeat S as the carrier for the DVDs, because the Zune couldn't act in that capacity (this was before the hack was known). Once I arrived in Hawaii I picked up a 120 GB 2.5" Western Digital hard drive.
We did daily excursions, so I was shooting a lot of images every day - I had the camera set to RAW + JPEG Fine, with the JPEG colour rendition on the D200 set to boosted contrast and saturation (the way I like my photos). I used the 80 GB enclosure to copy images onto when I came back from a day of shooting - I copied over the RAW and JPEG files and didn't do any culling (well, a bit of culling on the camera itself for the obviously bad photos). That drive served as my master backup - I wouldn't change anything on it once the images were copied over. I also copied over the photos and videos from the Canon SD800, again without any culling. I felt very secure knowing that I then had two copies of all of my images - I've always been concerned about having a hard drive failure on my laptop and losing all my newly-taken images.
My next step was to load the photos onto my laptop, but what I didn't take into account was the sheer size of the RAW + JPEG load. I only had about 15 GB free on the laptop's 80 GB hard drive, and that quickly filled up. By the end of my time in Hawaii I had shot around 3500 photos. That's when I started putting everything on the 120 GB Western Digital hard drive. I learned a lot about RAW processing during that time, namely that it's an intensive, slow process that takes a lot of CPU power. My small Fujitsu is a great laptop for travelling, but with a 1.2 Ghz Pentium M ultra-low voltage CPU, it's not meant for RAW processing.
One of the bigger problems was simply my RAW processing methodology: I was using Photoshop Elements 5.0 with the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in. It works fine and gives you a decent amount of control - but it only processes one image at a time. And because of the way I loaded images into it - a drag and drop from ACDSee Pro - I'd have to ALT+TAB back and forth between the two programs several times to release ACDSee from the clutches of Photoshop Elements. If I didn't, I'd get the "Server is busy, please re-try" Windows XP warning. It would have taken me hours to process a day's worth of RAW shooting, and after a long day of excursions I didn't have the time or energy to devote to processing my photos. Plus, my wife wouldn't have been too happy about it either.
A significant lesson that I learned is that it's hard to judge the value of a RAW image until after it's been processed. What I mean by that is if your image is in focus, and more or less framed properly, no matter what the exposure or colour rendition of the JPEG, you can't assume that the photo is a bad one until you've processed it with RAW. This makes the culling process much harder of course. Below is an example of what I mean.
Figure 1: Notice how the JPEG capture has completely blown out a portion of the sky. An initial culling pass might view this image as being worth instant deletion because it doesn't capture the sunset properly. [View view 1000 px image]
Figure 2: The RAW conversion processed allowed me to carefully control the exposure, keeping the detail in the sky, and also to fine-tune the white balance to give the photo the mood I was looking for. [View view 1000 px image]
Another example: quite often I'll look at at JPEG, and think it looks quite good, and want to keep the JPEG, delete the RAW, and save myself the processing time. Then I'll process the RAW image and be shocked at how much better it looks. Here's the original JPEG image, which at first glance looks decent. But after processing the RAW, the resulting image looks much better than the JPEG and more true to life. It's only by comparing the resulting RAW-processed JPEG that the original JPEGs colour problems stand out. I'm sure that as I gain more experience and practice with RAW processing I'll get better at realizing the problems with the JPEGs and understanding how RAW processing can correct them.
My next step along this journey is looking at tools for RAW processing - batch-based tools such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, DXO Optics Pro, and other similar programs that will allow me to take away the one by one processing pain of my current approach. Any suggestions for what software I should look at?
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's now wishing for quad-core CPUs to rain from the sky to help with all his RAW images that need processing.
We did daily excursions, so I was shooting a lot of images every day - I had the camera set to RAW + JPEG Fine, with the JPEG colour rendition on the D200 set to boosted contrast and saturation (the way I like my photos). I used the 80 GB enclosure to copy images onto when I came back from a day of shooting - I copied over the RAW and JPEG files and didn't do any culling (well, a bit of culling on the camera itself for the obviously bad photos). That drive served as my master backup - I wouldn't change anything on it once the images were copied over. I also copied over the photos and videos from the Canon SD800, again without any culling. I felt very secure knowing that I then had two copies of all of my images - I've always been concerned about having a hard drive failure on my laptop and losing all my newly-taken images.
My next step was to load the photos onto my laptop, but what I didn't take into account was the sheer size of the RAW + JPEG load. I only had about 15 GB free on the laptop's 80 GB hard drive, and that quickly filled up. By the end of my time in Hawaii I had shot around 3500 photos. That's when I started putting everything on the 120 GB Western Digital hard drive. I learned a lot about RAW processing during that time, namely that it's an intensive, slow process that takes a lot of CPU power. My small Fujitsu is a great laptop for travelling, but with a 1.2 Ghz Pentium M ultra-low voltage CPU, it's not meant for RAW processing.
One of the bigger problems was simply my RAW processing methodology: I was using Photoshop Elements 5.0 with the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in. It works fine and gives you a decent amount of control - but it only processes one image at a time. And because of the way I loaded images into it - a drag and drop from ACDSee Pro - I'd have to ALT+TAB back and forth between the two programs several times to release ACDSee from the clutches of Photoshop Elements. If I didn't, I'd get the "Server is busy, please re-try" Windows XP warning. It would have taken me hours to process a day's worth of RAW shooting, and after a long day of excursions I didn't have the time or energy to devote to processing my photos. Plus, my wife wouldn't have been too happy about it either.
A significant lesson that I learned is that it's hard to judge the value of a RAW image until after it's been processed. What I mean by that is if your image is in focus, and more or less framed properly, no matter what the exposure or colour rendition of the JPEG, you can't assume that the photo is a bad one until you've processed it with RAW. This makes the culling process much harder of course. Below is an example of what I mean.
Figure 1: Notice how the JPEG capture has completely blown out a portion of the sky. An initial culling pass might view this image as being worth instant deletion because it doesn't capture the sunset properly. [View view 1000 px image]
Figure 2: The RAW conversion processed allowed me to carefully control the exposure, keeping the detail in the sky, and also to fine-tune the white balance to give the photo the mood I was looking for. [View view 1000 px image]
Another example: quite often I'll look at at JPEG, and think it looks quite good, and want to keep the JPEG, delete the RAW, and save myself the processing time. Then I'll process the RAW image and be shocked at how much better it looks. Here's the original JPEG image, which at first glance looks decent. But after processing the RAW, the resulting image looks much better than the JPEG and more true to life. It's only by comparing the resulting RAW-processed JPEG that the original JPEGs colour problems stand out. I'm sure that as I gain more experience and practice with RAW processing I'll get better at realizing the problems with the JPEGs and understanding how RAW processing can correct them.
My next step along this journey is looking at tools for RAW processing - batch-based tools such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, DXO Optics Pro, and other similar programs that will allow me to take away the one by one processing pain of my current approach. Any suggestions for what software I should look at?
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's now wishing for quad-core CPUs to rain from the sky to help with all his RAW images that need processing.
