Friday, May 21, 2010

Not all RAW converters are equal!

After reading John's comments (on the Gelugor post)about what I must be doing wrong in trying to convert RAW images to jpegs, I hunted high and low through my dusty piles of CDs till I found my Canon EOS Installation disc, which was still sealed in its original plastic sleeve!

I installed Digital Photo Professional and did a quick upgrade to the latest version from the net. Then I revisited my Little Heron pic from the other day, which I had processed from RAW using a freebie RAW converter called Stepok's RAW Importer.

No tweaks or filters - just a straight convert and crop. Here's what I found:



Stepok



DPP


Still can't see any difference? Let me blow up a small section of each picture...



Stepok



DPP

NOW I see the difference! Thanks a lot John. Guess I'll have to start buying some more CF cards so I can shoot in RAW!




DPP (left) Stepok (right)

THAT'S better!
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5 comments:

  1. Wong Tsu Shi10:11 pm

    Hi, Dave, CF cards are cheap nowadays. by shooting RAW, you can make minor mistakes and get away with it.

    I only shoot RAW.

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8:23 pm

    Dave,
    How about shooting in RAW and JPEG
    and comparing it side-by-side.
    That would be easy if your camera
    can shoot 1 scene in both RAW and
    JPEG at one go. Otherwise shoot
    one is RAW and quickly in JPEG
    provided the bird is still around.
    Choo Eng.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stuart Price9:35 pm

    DPP, for a free application, is great. I do my initial cull and blog uploads on DPP (with resizing/sharpening in Photoshop) and then move my keepers into Lightroom from where I upload to my online galleries.........

    Great Heron pics BTW!

    ReplyDelete
  4. John Holmes12:10 pm

    Glad using DPP is working out for you, Dave !

    We ALWAYS shoot RAW, and, as T.S. said, the CF cards are not expensive

    J & J

    ReplyDelete
  5. digdeep12:18 pm

    Thanks guys

    After some more experimentation I concluded the following:
    1. JPEGs converted from RAW are almost no different in terms of quality cf JPEGs taken in camera
    2. RAW is useful for adjusting light/WB etc in post-processing, so would be worth using for that reason
    3. RAW takes longer to write to card, so when taking bursts at high fps rates, jpegs are best

    Would you agree?

    Thanks

    Dave

    ReplyDelete