Thursday, January 20, 2011

Consider shooting RAW because you are going to get better over time …

Many reasons are given as mantra for why it makes sense to shoot RAW instead of JPEG when you have the opportunity and are not constrained. I add that last bit because some people shoot in situations where they need to turn over the images essentially directly from the card. Photojournalists and sports photographers for example … I once shot a Globetrotters event as one of the fan photographers and was given a card and told to shoot medium jpeg. Worked out fine, but you get my point.

So … I happened to be looking over some images in my long unused flickr page and came across this hand held shot of the moon.

_DSC4822_moon

Yuck, I thought. This is grainy as hell …

So I went back into my archives to find out what I has screwed up. I had shot it hand held while walking around Lake Buena Vista inside Epcot at the Swan and Dolphin resort, and had cranked the cam up to 3200 ISO to get fast shutter speeds to handle any camera movement, but I should have tried some images at lower ISO and slower shutter speeds. 1/1000 is absolute overkill.

So today I spent about 5 minutes with my best RAW processing tools, including the latest ACR and some Photoshop plugins like PKSharpener 2, which just came out, and Topaz Denoise 5, which is only a few months old.

I’m sure that you will agree that the results are quite improved …

_DSC4822_moon2

Click through to the larger versions to see the differences more clearly.

So that is a good lesson to reinforce what I already knew … get the best quality capture you can, because the tools will get better over time and so will you …

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