Photodigitary

Flower Time

I love this time of year with all of the flowers. One reason we moved from Minnesota to California was because of the long spring. In Minnesota, it is very short — green leaves are out around May first and summer starts by mid-June. I am basing this on flowers and spring growth. In Southern California, that same time starts about the end of January and ends in mid-June.

I was up in Los Osos doing a workshop with the great folks at Light Photographic Workshops two weeks ago. We were doing flowers and landscapes and the flowers definitely cooperated. Here are some images with some brief notes about them from that week.

The opening shot is of a blue dick flower. A lot of people don’t appreciate the high quality you can get with an achromatic close-up lens. This was shot at a telephoto zoom setting with my Canon G11 and an achromatic close-up lens (this one from Century Optics, though Canon makes some good ones, too). Blue flowers don’t always record as blue, which was true here, so I had to correct the color in the computer (hue adjustment in Photoshop or Lightroom).

Lupines on a hill at dusk after a storm. There  is no camera that can capture the full range of brightness in a scene like this even though we can see it fine. HDR doesn’t work because it was windy and the flowers were blowing, plus HDR affects the whole image. I shot two exposures, one for the sky and one for the lupines. I processed them in Lightroom then combined the exposures in Photoshop to get an image more accurate to the scene. I then added some traditional “burning in” (darkening) to the edges and bottom for more drama.

Telephotos for close ups give a really nice look with limited depth of field and a change in perspective. This makes the background a pleasing color and tonality.

I also like wide-angles up close. This gives the flower a context and environment. It places it into a specific ecosystem. The trick is to deal with the extended space and depth of field that can make the composition too busy. In this case, the low early light and the sky makes the monkey flowers stand out.

Here’s a good case for a tilting LCD. I had climbed a hill with the group where some bush lupines were. I decided to travel light with only my G11. I got this high angle by holding the camera over my head and framing with the tilting LCD.

In June, I will be leading a workshop on the landscapes and flowers of the Eastern Sierras. Late June offers some wonderful wildflowers in the mountains there. I will be working the area from Lone Pine, California, to Yosemite. GAPW June Eastern Sierras.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

Backing Up Lightroom

A lot of photographers now understand that it is important to back up their digital images on a separate hard drive (or drives). This is really important because hard drives do fail.

A lot of Lightroom users do not understand the importance of backing up the Lightroom database. Lightroom is a database. That means that it does nothing to the images themselves (until you export them) — that is a great advantage. You can freely work with images without worrying about hurting them. You can’t.

However, Lightroom has to store the information somewhere on what has been done with your photos. That is its database and is a .lrcat file usually found in the Pictures folder (both Mac and Windows) in its own Lightroom folder. Backing up this database is an important back up. You can simply go to the Lightroom folder just mentioned and copy the latest .lrcat file to a new location. You can also tell Lightroom to remind you to back this up when you open Lightroom (go to Catalog Settings under the Lightroom menu for Mac and the Edit menu for PC). Lightroom 3 will prompt you to back up your database when the program closes (who knows when Lightroom 3 will actually be out — Adobe is still messing around with public betas).

This backs up the Lightroom database. I have needed it more than once. This allows you to reopen Lightroom with all of your work if the database gets corrupted. Or you could have a crash of your computer and lose Lightroom. I had a situation where I think the Mac Genius folks were lazy and reformatted my hard drive because of a problem with the disc drive. I could reinstall Lightroom easily, but when you do that, it starts over from scratch. You don’t want to do that. You want to start from where you were before. So that’s exactly what I did, used the backed up database.

I can’t overemphasize how important this is. Without that database, your work in Lightroom can be lost. One safety thing is to tell Lightroom to save any processed files with an .xmp file (that is the data used for processing and will be reread by Lightroom if the database is lost). That is also under Catalog Settings, Metadata.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom | 1 Comment »

Cropping Photos

The question often comes up in workshops and classes. When should one crop? Is one allowed to crop? (Yes, that question does come up. Some instructors evidently are rather severe about cropping).

I believe that ideally, you should be looking for the best possible composition as you shoot. You should always be trying to have as complete a photo as possible captured when you take the picture. I don’t have any problems with cropping as long as one is not using that as a substitute for seeing the scene well in the first place.

The problem with cropping is that you can only crop what you have recorded with your camera. You cannot get a new and better composition of the whole scene because what you have recorded is not the whole scene, only part. So cropping can only give something less than what was available on location and cannot expand your options.

Another problem with cropping is that you lose image quality. I hear an interesting thing all the time — photographers who like the multi-multi-megapixel cameras because they can crop the image and still have high image quality. There are problems with that. It definitely means one is trying to substitute cropping for seeing the scene well in the first place. Sure, one can crop, but the real question becomes what did that photographer miss in the first place that means he or she has to crop now … and crop out of a limited view of the subject and scene (because what is in the photo is all you have).

It is possible to compose a full image right from the start, and that goes for anyone. If you start relying on cropping to finish your photos, then you are not getting your best images when the subject is actually in front of your camera. The way to use the whole image area is to really look at it and really see it. Years ago, I taught myself to scan the edges of the image every time I took a photo. This included photojournalistic work I was doing at the time and was hammered into me by one of my mentors. He allowed no excuses for a moving and changing subject. Now, with digital cameras, you can always check your LCD playback to see what you are getting and make adjustments to your compositional choices.

That said, you should always present your best version of your photograph. If that means cropping the photo, then crop the photo. We all get stuff along the edges of the image at times that we did not see, whether that is because of wind or dark conditions or just shooting too fast. So cropping is important to get rid of the junk. But regardless of the situation, you don’t need to say you cropped your photo. Your viewers don’t care, or at least, they should be so interested in your photograph that they don’t care.

The photo of Bridal Veil Fall in Yosemite National Park at the top of this blog entry is uncropped. That is exactly what I saw and captured with the camera. The photo of the snow plant below is cropped on the right side. I was shooting with the live LCD and the dark straps of my camera backpack blended in with the dark background — I did not see them hanging out along the right side of the photo. But I saw them when I opened the photo on the computer. I loved the shot, but the straps had to go, so they were cropped out.

By the way, I find Lightroom is a wonderful tool for cropping because it is non-destructive and you can change your crop as much as you want. A tip for experimenting with cropping is to make a virtual copy (or copies) of your photo and do crops on it so you can compare the results with the original.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, landscape photography | 3 Comments »

Lightroom Workflow

Lightroom is, I believe, the best processing and cataloging program for photographers, bar none. It is made for photographers, it is far easier to learn and use than Photoshop, plus it is faster and more efficient. With Lightroom, you spend your time with your photos, not the program. For nature photographers, especially, Lightroom does not chain you to the computer or make you learn things you don’t really need to know.

Because Lightroom is so important to my workflow (honestly, I could not do the work I do today without it) and because I have seen so many photographers enjoy digital photography more when they have learned it, I have put together a couple of DVDs to help photographers better use Lightroom that are available at www.robsheppardphoto.com.

I have had a lot of requests for doing something on Lightroom workflow, and in putting these together, I have worked to keep them simple, direct and helpful. I have brought together the techniques, the tips, the tricks on these video programs that really do work for nature photographers.

Of course, they work for other photographers, too, but I had to use something for examples, so I chose my love, nature photography. Plus, nature photographers deserve a program that makes their work the star because most Lightroom books and videos are not geared toward the outdoor photographer who loves nature.

There is no fancy packaging to add to the price, just solid information on working with your photos in Lightroom. I have one DVD on Library workflow, the other on the Develop module. One disc is $19.95, two are $29.95, no postage, no handling fees, no extra charges. I have even included the same image files that I use for demonstration so you can follow along if you want.

The videos are based on Lightroom 2, Mac or Windows, and I have included a segment on what is new for Lightroom 3.

Library DVD Content:

• Message, 8 min. – a personal message
• Interface, 12 min. – an overview of the Lightroom interface with some tips on using it
• Import, 28 min. – getting images into Lightroom efficiently and effectively
• Traditional Edit, 24 min. – sorting the good from the bad; tips on editing your photos in the traditional photographic sense of editing
• Keywords & Metadata, 24 min. – working with keywords and metadata
• Collections & Filters, 44 min. – using collections effectively and using filters for searching Library
• New in Lightroom 3, 5 min. – what’s new in Lightroom 3 for Library

Develop DVD Content:

• Develop Message, 12 min. – personal message
• Intro to Workflow, 14 min. – an overview of Develop workflow
• Blacks, Whites, Midtones, 37 minutes – a critical part of the process for me is getting blacks, whites and midtones right from the start; a bit on cropping is included
• Color, 15 min. – tips on working color for correction and enhancement
• Sharpen, 12 min. – the sharpen tools for Lightroom are quite different than Photoshop; here’s a way to work with them
• Local Adjustments, 35 min. – this is what makes Lightroom truly give the tools of the traditional darkroom
• Example & Presets, 28 min. – a full example of using this Lightroom workflow is shown, plus an overview on using presets
• Export Function, 27 min. – here’s how to get images out of Lightroom
• New in Lightroom 3, 9 min. – what’s new in Lightroom 3 for Develop

You can order these videos at www.robsheppardphoto.com.

Posted in Lightroom, nature photography | Comments Off

Getting Neutral Tones Where You Need Them

A friend of mine is a pilot and was frustrated by photographing clouds. He could never get the color right.

I gave him some ideas, something he might try for color in clouds, and thought my readers would be interested in this, too. While he was talking about clouds, the techniques here work for any situation where color is off. I will give this for Photoshop and Lightroom/Camera Raw. The key to doing this is to understand that you are using a control that works to make neutral tones neutral, i.e., whites, grays and blacks without color casts. You do need to have an idea of where the neutral tones are in a photo (parts of clouds are typically neutral, to use my friend’s example), but this does not have to be precise. You simply click on whatever you think should be neutral and keep clicking new spots until the photo looks good. If some of your clicks look bad, so what? Just click somewhere else. Here are the steps:

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements:
1. Open a Levels adjustment layer over your photo.
2. Click on the middle eyedropper of the three eyedroppers in Levels in order to select it.
3. Move your cursor onto the photo (the cursor will look like an eyedropper).
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the middle eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones — you can click on white, gray or black sorts of tones).
5. Keep clicking until you are close, but a little over-adjusted.
6. Use Layer Opacity to control how strong the layer is applied.

Lightroom and Camera Raw:
1. Click on the White Balance eyedropper (in the toolbar at top with Camera Raw, in Basic in Develop in Lightroom).
2. Uncheck auto dismiss (in toolbar in Lightroom below photo)
3. Move your cursor onto the photo — it will be an eyedropper.
4. Click with the bottom of the eyedropper on parts of the photo that should be neutral (the WB eyedropper is for taking color casts out of neutral tones such as white, gray and black).
5. Keep clicking until you get what you want.
6. Tweak adjustment if needed with Temperature and Tint adjustment sliders.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

New Software

I want to tell you about some new software I am using, but before I do that, I feel a need to qualify this blog. I love software that helps me get better results from my photography and makes it easier and faster to work with photos — so I get excited about anything that does this. However, I realize that not everyone will share my excitement, and that’s okay. I don’t think everyone needs to do the same things with their images. I also cannot tell you if you will like this program, if it fits your workflow or your budget. I can only tell you what I like and how it affects my work. I say these things because I know that it is easy to get excited about software and not appreciate that the cost may be a significant factor for people who don’t work with these things for a living like I do.

Okay, the software. Nik Software just introduced Viveza 2, the latest version of this software. I like a number of things about it, including its original technology for carefully controlling adjustments in a specific area of the photo. I saw this technology, U-Point, in development years ago and was quite impressed with it at the time. U-Point technology is in a number of programs now for Nik Software, including Nikon Capture (also made by Nik), Dfine and Color Efex Pro (all very good, highly photographer-centric programs). Viveza uses the technology to create what is essentially an alternative to Photoshop’s adjustment layers and layer masks. You click on something in the photo you want to adjust.

You then adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation (which, by the way, is a far better saturation control than the one in Photoshop) and an area to be influenced. The U-Point technology finds similar color, tone and texture to what you clicked on and limits adjustments to that. You don’t have to do any selections or work with layer masks. In addition, you can add minus control points to places that are being adjusted to prevent them from being adjusted. This is just a click on the photo and you have control. The U-Point technology is very good at finding just the colors, textures, etc. that you want without a lot of work on your part.

Viveza 1 did all of that. What 2 does is add some very nice global controls that allow you to quickly and easily adjust the overall image, plus you gain a new adjustment parameter called Structure. I am so impressed with Structure (which can be used overall or with selected points using U-Point technology) that for nature photography, I find it alone is worth the price of the program.

Now do you see why I qualified this blog in my opening paragraph? I know that some people will think I am crazy saying that one small feature is worth the price of software that is not inexpensive. It all depends on your work and what you like to do. For me, Structure solves a problem I have long struggled with, and that is getting good detail and tonal rendition in the mid-tones, especially the dark tones. Clarity in Lightroom and Camera Raw is a good addition to those programs and does that to a degree. However, I find that clarity can quickly make a subject look harsh and you can lose subtle tonalities. Structure doesn’t do that. It gives great “structure” to tonalities without making them look harsh or destroying subtle tonalities. And to have that in both overall and local adjustments is great.

In the photos I have uploaded, you will see a first photo as it might come from Lightroom or Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Then you see an overall adjustment to structure — notice how the granite rocks really become defined much better. Then I added some local adjustments to just the sky and the flowers. Bright yellow flowers can be difficult to really define because of the way that digital cameras handle bright colors, but Structure has allowed me to bring out their detail and even add some quality saturation (you can see this well in the preview at the bottom right — the left side is before, the right side is after).

Viveza 2 works with Lightroom as an export plug-in, Photoshop and Photoshop Elements as normal plug-ins. Frankly, the average photographer could use Photoshop Elements and Viveza and do work better and faster than most photographers working with Photoshop alone.  Nik Software is at www.niksoftware.com.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop techniques | Comments Off

Why Auto White Balance is Not a Good Choice

Everyone says that it is so easy to change white balance in RAW, that you can simply set your camera to AWB when you shoot RAW and set white balance in Lightroom or other program. Yet, though this may be true in concept, I consistently see problems with white balance due to that technique because of the problems with auto white balance or AWB.

First off, AWB is inconsistent. You can take a picture of the same scene with wide angle and telephoto focal lengths and get two different white balances. The colors will be different, even though they should be identical. Now you are faced with a workflow problem — you have to adjust white balance of at least one of the photos, yet if you set your camera to a specific white balance, often you would not do any adjusting at all.

Now if you have to adjust white balance, then you are faced with a decision. Suppose you have those two images that came up with different color because of AWB — which one is correct or alternately which one is better? Or maybe neither! So regardless of what program you are working with, you have a workflow issue where you have to go in and change white balance settings.

And that gives another problem. A lot of people see the settings for white balance in Lightroom and Camera Raw, notice that they are similar to the camera’s settings, and figure that they can just set these settings there. Actually, you can’t. Those settings are Adobe colors, Adobe interpretations of digital image files, not interpretations of a real-world scene as your camera is doing. This means that if you have two radically different images that are both in standard daylight conditions and set both to Adobe’s daylight setting, for example, you can get different looks for both photos. That’s definitely a problem.

And there are other problems, including one that I had not thought about until I started seeing so many photographs from my students at BetterPhoto.com that I was recognizing as having been shot with AWB. When digital cameras first came out, I was an advocate for setting a specific white balance, especially when shooting outdoors. This, to me, was simply a part of the craft of photography now modified by digital. I have always felt that it is best to capture the best image from the start rather than trying to “fix” it later, which is what using AWB plus a RAW software to set white balance does. But I did not believe that I could actually recognize AWB until I started seeing consistent color problems such as weaker colors and colors that are contaminated by blue.

What I think seems to happen is that the photographer gets back in front of the computer  after shooting something outside and sees the image in isolation. AWB may often give a compromised color, but it usually looks “okay” on the monitor, and most photographers don’t shoot a series of varied shots of the same subject, so they don’t see the variation in color that AWB gives. So they don’t make the white balance adjustment needed, the white balance adjustment that some RAW aficionados say makes AWB fine to use. AWB would be okay to use if the photographer always made an adjustment, but so often, like I said, the AWB photo looks okay and so the photographer accepts the weaker color and contaminated blues because there is nothing to compare to.

So for me, it is a workflow and photographic craft issue. I set my white balance to a specific setting because I want consistent results when shooting in the field, because I want to be sure I have captured the best colors while I am still in the field, and because I don’t want to have to “fix it” in Lightroom (which is my program of choice).

Do I use AWB? Yes. I think it is an important control when you are indoors with screwy lighting. It can be hard in those conditions to figure out what to do for white balance. I also think that custom white balance is a good thing to use in those conditions, including devices such as the Spyder Cube that are a great help when working with a RAW file in Lightroom or other program in order to get neutral colored neutral colors. Custom white balance is trickier to use outdoors in nature because there are often important natural color casts to such scenes that you want to retain or even emphasize.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom | 2 Comments »

Lightroom 3 beta

Adobe just announced its next version of Lightroom as Lightroom 3 beta. That is exactly what it says, a beta, meaning it is unfinished. This is not a program to use for your main work as it has bugs in it and things that don’t work quite right yet. While Adobe tends to be very secretive about their plans for a final version of anything, I would expect the final version of Lightroom 3 to be available maybe by early spring next year.

Before I talk about some of the new features that you might find of interest, I should just talk a little about Lightroom and RAW converters. To be honest, I am not that interested in other programs. I find that Lightroom is the best image handling and processing program available today for most photographers. I don’t base that simply on my work with Lightroom (although I can tell you very honestly that I could not produce the books and workshops I do now at the pace I do them without Lightroom). I also base this on working with many, many photographers in classes, workshops and even one-on-one consulting that Lightroom works very well indeed for photographers. Compared to Photoshop, it is interesting that when I do a Photoshop workshop, it can take a week before students really start to feel comfortable, yet with Lightroom, they are actively and confidently working on their own within 2-3 days.

I cannot recommend Aperture, for example, because it is missing some key photographic controls — you cannot check black levels with a threshold screen (which I consider vital to good image processing) and you cannot do dodging and burning non-destructively (you must use an export plug-in). Lightroom does dodging and burning non-destructively within the program and truly brings me back to traditional darkroom work. Nikon’s Capture NX is a superb program, for another example, but it is only available for Nikon RAW files (though it can handle anyone’s JPEG files), so that makes it limited in use for only a select group of photographers.

Lightroom 3 has had its processing engine taken apart and rebuilt, from what I hear from Adobe. This is a big deal with RAW files as images from such files must be “built” from RAW data such as keeping the color pattern of pixels from the sensor as is (the color pattern from nearly all sensors is not the way the world looks and has to be “developed” in order to get a correct image). So having a better processing engine will mean better final results in many aspects, including a cleaner file from any camera. Some people are finding that the program is now giving substantially improved results from smaller sensor, many megapixeled cameras that starts to rival larger sensor cameras.

One thing that is different is a new noise reduction set of algorithms (and this comes from the new processing engine). I was never much impressed with the noise reduction of any Adobe products. This now promises excellent noise reduction within the Lightroom workflow, which is a welcome feature. Color noise works in the beta, but luminance is not functional yet. I am still optimistic, given Adobe’s talents, that the final results will be quite good.

One thing I quite like about LR 3 is the new Import feature. Import was not bad before, but it is such an important function, and the old version didn’t give it the feeling of importance that it deserved. Consequently, many photographers breezed by many key import decisions. I think the new interface for Import is well thought out and uses a similar format to the modules of Lightroom, which elevates it to “module level” of importance. I think that is a good thing, plus the new Import interface makes it easier to make the right decisions for importing photos.

Another thing I really like about LR3 that has absolutely nothing to do with better photos is the change from Grayscale to Black-and-White. It’s about time. Grayscale was never a very photographic term. No one who worked with black-and-white photography ever said they were going to do some grayscale printing today! Grayscale is a computer term and an affectation for photographers who have no sense of history. Black-and-white continues the very strong emphasis that Lightroom has on being highly photography centric.

I have really liked the vignetting feature of LR2 that allows quick and easy darkening of the edges of a photo. Ansel Adams made a big deal about edge darkening in his books (and I still consider his book, The Print, a must for digital photographers — just skip all the chemistry stuff). In LR3, the post-crop vignette gains some new algorithms which have been described as giving a “more natural look.” Although I am not sure what a more natural look really means for such an effect, the new vignettes do look quite pleasing and you get some new options on how color and tone are affected.

A very noticeable new feature of LR 3 is the Publish Services in the Library. To be honest, I have not used this part of the beta. It is designed to make publishing photos to websites (such as Flickr) and other “off-site” locations easier.

Slideshows now get music that can be fit to the slides, plus you can save your slide show in a video form that keeps music with it. That is a big improvement, but still, the slideshow capabilities of Lightroom are pretty limited. If you are serious about slide shows, check out ProShow Gold from Photodex Software for Windows or FotoMagico from Boinx Software for the Mac. Even a simple video program such as Adobe Premiere Elements will give more flexibility with slide shows.

There is more, but the highlights above are what stand out for me. Check out Victoria Bampton’s blog, Lightroom Queen, to get more info on LR3.

Posted in Books, Lightroom | 2 Comments »

Digital Exposure of Bright Tones

As we all become more sophisticated and experienced in working with digital, we learn new things or learn things about specific recommendations that revise our thoughts about them. I have been doing a lot of work lately with brighter objects in a scene and this has made me challenge some ideas you often see about digital exposure. This was especially brought home to me during a workshop I was doing last week in the Eastern Sierras.

You may have heard of the expression, “Expose to the right.” This means that you expose to push the histogram to the right. A number of RAW digital gurus recommend this as a standard way of shooting, even to the extent of going past exposure warnings by the camera and overexposing bright areas slightly. The reason for this is that Camera RAW and Lightroom especially will recover detail in such bright areas. By exposing to the right, you do minimize noise in the image. Also, you will hear that what you are seeing in the LCD is a JPEG image and not the actual RAW file (which is true as the RAW file cannot be directly displayed). The implication is that the LCD display is therefore faulty.

After a lot of field work and comparing images, I can’t agree with that advice. I think one should expose as well as possible, neither overexposing nor underexposing bright areas. There is a big problem that occurs in nature photography with even slight overexposure of bright areas — loss of color. It is true that you can recover tonal detail from very bright areas, and that Camera RAW and Lightroom do a very good job of that. However, digital cameras do something unlike our eyes. As exposure is increased, the sensor’s response to color decreases. The chroma or “color-ness” of a color quickly disappears. Test this for yourself by shooting RAW at varied exposures. You will find that color in bright objects starts to disappear before the detail of the object is gone and that color cannot be recovered.

The same thing happens at the low end of the tonal scale. As colored objects are underexposed, the chroma of the colors will also disappear before the detail of the object is gone, and it also cannot be recovered.

This is why you need to get the best exposure possible for the scene. I use the highlight warnings and histogram for exposure in a way that is related to Ansel Adams’ Zone System. I have not really discussed this before because a lot of people don’t know that system. I don’t suggest running out and trying to learn it as that can take some time. Basically, what his System does is look at brightness values in the real world and try to relate them to brightness values that can be recorded on film based on exposure.

I adjust exposure until the highlight warnings just appear, then make a judgement as to whether that is wrong or right for the subject. What is happening is this — I am metering the scene to “place” the brightest areas on the brightest zone, a zone of tonality without detail. If I think that area needs some detail, I back off the exposure to give a half-stop less exposure (if you are shooting RAW, shooting with 1/3 increments, the default of many cameras, is a waste of time and shots). If that area is really unimportant in terms of detail, I can either leave the exposure alone or even give it a slight boost. For tricky scenes, I will check my histogram.

By placing this brightest part of the scene at a bright recorded value, I am also ensuring my dark areas will get optimum exposure as well given the dynamic range of the sensor and camera. If I am not getting good exposure then in the dark areas, I realize that I am going to have to either overexpose bright area and lose color and detail there or use an HDR technique.

So what about the display of JPEG in the LCD? I don’t find that matters. If I follow the procedure just described, I get good detail in my bright areas and that includes good color there. I think this is because of the extra detail in bright areas that comes from the RAW file compared to the JPEG image. If I push the shot so the bright areas really start to have warnings, I may find that I can pull detail out of those areas with RAW processing, but I will not get the best color. It is important to note that I am paying attention to the point at which the warnings appear. Do not assume you have a good exposure if no warnings appear; a badly underexposed photo can occur then.

In shooting with a lot of digital cameras beyond the ones that I own and in seeing work of a lot of students, I note that digital cameras do their best work at capturing color when the color is neither too bright nor too dark, in other words, in the middle of the range. This points out something important to consider when colors of bright areas are really critical — you might expose them at a point where the exposure warning just disappears. That will ensure that the bright areas drop down into better color capture range of the sensor. However, do not underexpose them or your dark areas will suffer (unless you want a dramatic photo with very dark, dark areas, which can be an interesting interpretation of some scenes).

You will run into situations where conditions are very challenging. First is a high contrast scene where exposing the bright areas properly means the dark areas are way underexposed. There is nothing you can do about that with a single exposure. You either have to find a different composition or use HDR. Second is a soft, low contrast scene, such as that seen after sunset. This will give you a histogram that is a small hill that does not fill the whole graph. Be very careful that you do not underexpose such a scene. That will cause processing problems, including noise and increased contrast. Expose so that the histogram spans the middle of the graph area or even slightly to the right.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom, landscape photography, nature photography | 1 Comment »

RAW and JPEG Revisited

A lot could be written on RAW and JPEG (and I have done a bit myself in several books). I get enough questions about them that I thought it would be helpful to write down some thoughts. My ideas about photographers using RAW have changed, not because the files have changed, but because computers, software and memory cards have changed. Early in the digital change, memory cards were expensive and computers struggled with RAM. That meant the bigger RAW files could be a liability and a pain to work with. In addition, the RAW conversion programs were not always very intuitive and added steps to workflow. I have always been more interested in encouraging photographers than discouraging them. RAW files discouraged people. This has changed today and RAW can be as easy to work with as JPEG.

First, it is important to consider what RAW and JPEG are. A RAW file is an image file that takes a maximum amount of data from the image sensor (it is not, as some people think, an unprocessed file as it is processed for color and noise as it comes from the sensor and converted to digital bits in the A/D or analog digital converter). A JPEG file is an image that is processed from the RAW file while still inside your camera. You can consider it an automated RAW conversion. It is also a smartly compressed file that keeps the file size smaller. However, and this is very important, the size of a RAW and JPEG image from a given camera are identical — the file sizes are different because of the amount of compression of the file, but the image sizes are the same.

Another misconception is that RAW files are somehow inherently of higher quality than a JPEG file. That is not true. If you opened a RAW file directly without processing and compared it to a JPEG file at high quality (i.e., high quality set on the camera), you would probably prefer the JPEG file (most people do), and you will not see any sharpness or other quality problems with JPEG compared to RAW. However, that “without processing” qualification is very important. Because the RAW file holds more original data from the sensor, it has much more flexibility in processing. There is a lot more you can do with it whether you are using Camera Raw, Lightroom or another program. It is sort of like boxes of Crayola crayons. JPEG is like a 12-color box, while RAW is like a 48-color box (actually the difference is much higher). Can you color a great image with 12 crayon colors? Of course. Can you gain more flexibility in your coloring with 48 colors? Absolutely. Can you also screw up the photo with those extra colors? Also true.

So a RAW file gives you flexibility and control. This is especially true in the dark and light parts of your photo. You can always get more detail there from a RAW file than a JPEG file. When would you use them? If you need images quickly, including direct printing from your camera or memory card, such as putting a memory card in a printer or getting prints from that card at a store such as Target, then only JPEG will do.

If you need to shoot a lot of images onto a memory card and you are worried about space, JPEG will be better. If you shoot sports or other action, you may find that shooting JPEG means you can shoot continuously without stopping, while shooting with RAW will cause your camera to stop shooting when the camera buffer is filled with image data waiting in line to be transferred to the memory card. If you want to keep things simple, JPEG is easy because you can set up the camera to give certain looks to the photo without going into the computer.

If you want the best control over your image, then you need RAW. If you frequently photograph subjects with challenging dynamic ranges, such as landscapes with bright clouds, RAW will work better. If you consistently shoot images with problem bright areas or dark areas, RAW will work better. If you really pay attention to how your image is processed and you want the richest tonalities and colors, RAW is better.

Shooting RAW used to be a pain because of the added workflow steps it required. However, today, that is no longer true with Lightroom. Lightroom allows you to process any image file equally. It does not force you to a different program to deal with RAW. It was designed specifically for photographers, compared to Photoshop which was not. The result is that photographers can deal with their photos faster, easier and more efficiently in Lightroom. RAW or JPEG work the same in Lightroom. Many photographers shoot RAW + JPEG (including me). This gives them a JPEG file that can be quickly and easily used anywhere and any time, especially for making quick prints. This also gives them a RAW file that can be finessed into the optimum interpretation of the image file as needed.

Posted in Digital Photo Techniques, Digital camera techniques, Lightroom | 1 Comment »