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Rescuing Overexposed Shots

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Take the following two pictures:

Unprocessed Image

Unprocessed Image

Processed

Processed

The thing that should jump out at you in the “before” picture is that the clouds have virtually no definition and the sky is washed out.  They are drastically overexposed due to the dark foreground.  Now, some of this may be due to the altitude – I was about 8,000 feet above sea level, something I’m not too used to.  So my mental focus wasn’t that sharp, and I didn’t review the histogram on-site for blown-out highlights. Click to continue »

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Why JPG format for HDRs?

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Someone asked me, after my JPG vs RAW  posts (1, 2, and 3), why I kicked my camera over to save images in JPG mode for doing the 9-shot bracketed HDR.  My thought process is like this: I usually shoot RAW because I like the flexability that it gives me to… well, save my photo.  I take a lot of pictures of a rapidly moving daughter, so I need that flexability.

For HDRs, though, I don’t really need the flexability.  Think of it like this: a normal RAW image gives you between one and two stops to either side of the center.  If you’ve mildly over- or under-exposed, then this will be easy to fix.  A 9-shot HDR gives you four stops to either side.  It’s already way ahead of the game.

If that were a 9-shot RAW pic?  That might push the overall range to 5 stops on either side.  We’re already wide enough in range at that point, that the extra stop doesn’t really mean much to me.

So I usually skip it.

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Revisiting RAW vs. JPG

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

It seems that recently I’ve started moving back to using JPG formats for my images. Two months into this blog, and I’ve realized that (for the web, at least), I never start post-processing from the RAW image. That’s partly because the JPG conversion on the sd500 is excellent – it usually takes me much more work in Adobe RAW & Photoshop to get to the same point (which usually means tweaking the black point, adding some fill light, adjusting contrast, and adding sharpness).

RAW is still the far superior format and I should use it exclusively. I’m just finding that my actual use doesn’t require it.

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JPG vs. RAW, according to a chimp (pt. 1)

Monday, April 13th, 2009

If you’re relatively new to photography or just use your camera on the basic settings, then you’ve always gotten your photos in JPG format.  It doesn’t really matter if you know what the JPG format is.  What is important is that you can take the pictures directly out of your camera, resize them some way, and post them either to your photo-sharing site of choice (like Flickr) or email away.

Biking Anchorage's trails in the fall of 2000

Biking Anchorage's trails in the fall of 2000

JPG files are already processed somewhat by the camera’s internal programming.  This can be good, but you actually lose a little bit of detail.  JPG is lossey, which is to say that it compresses the image to a point that the image loses a little bit of detail (in favor of smaller image size).  If you keep working over a JPG image, you can end up with something that’s pretty ugly.

Check out the photo to the right, for example.  Looks good at the small in-screen size, but click on it & see it at a medium size.  Pretty blocky – a lot of detail lost in the tree, and the sky is somewhat… blotchy.  This was a pic from an old Kodak camera – one of the first digital cameras – and it was glorious for its day.  But the lossey compression right out of the camera really did a number on it.

So, I currently use the Canon sd500 for tooling around.  A short summary about formats from Canon’s spec sheet on the camera:

  • Image Compression: Still: Exif 2.2 (JPEG); Movies: AVI (Image data: Motion JPEG; Audio data: WAVE (Monaural))
  • JPEG Compression Mode: Normal, Fine, SuperFine
  • Print Order Format: Design rule for camera file system Exif 2.2 (JPEG) and DPOF (Version 1.1) compliant

This translates to: the sd500 only takes JPG images.  Much higher quality ones, mind you – every pic I’ve shown on this site from that camera (so far) has been processed out of the JPG.  However, I can’t rely on that.  You see, RAW image format holds much more information.  No more “camera decided to blow out the clouds” pictures (like the above pic).  The info is there, but you have to run post processing to pull it out.

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