RAW woes

[croos]

"Only it seems geared towards printing"

That is probably because that was the way it started out.

I do so few prints these days that I actually ran some test files on my Epson 3880 this morning as I was worried it might dry up over the Christmas holiday. QU actually has a head cleaning mode if you worry that cleaning with the printer software uses too much ink.

JS makes the points:-

1) exposure adjustment, including highlight and shadow recovery - this does things you can't do in PWP after the conversion.
2) lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting) - you could do these in PWP, but not automatically
3) noise reduction - some forms of noise reduction work better on raw files

Qimage Ultimate does all of those. How much better than any other software I have never seen reported. I reckon that because the GUI is so different the usual internet chat group gurus never want to spend (waste?) time learning how to use it. I have worked some miracles with some rubbish RAWs. I tend to ETTR and sometimes overdo it. The embedded jpg in my RAW file looks horrendous and yet somehow QU finds a bit of info in the blown bits. I foolishly shot a bright interior scene at 20,000 ASA on Saturday with my new Ricoh that I have yet to familiarise myself with. QU has managed to hide most of the noise and no a soul has questioned the look of the shots on my website. I had a 7-14 F4 m43 lens that had severe distortion but Mike Chaney made me a profile and it could even be used for portraits without embarassment.

Please do not think this is an advert for QU. Just a suggestion it might suit you as a companion to PWP - in the way it has been in my case for years.

No fret. I've more or less asked for software tips, so if it is against board policy the blame is on me. But even Jonathan recommends program, so it should be OK. I hope. Because I just tipped about one.

Thanks for the explanation. I'll try QU when the two trials I've already installed run out. I think I have too much new software on my table already now. Need to slow down or I won't be able take anything in.

[doug]

Here are the operations I think are best performed by the raw converter, listed in order of importance:

1) exposure adjustment, including highlight and shadow recovery - this does things you can't do in PWP after the conversion.
2) lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting) - you could do these in PWP, but not automatically
3) noise reduction - some forms of noise reduction work better on raw files

Pretty much everything else I do in PWP.

I had been including white balance adjustment in that list. So it is very interesting to learn that you don't consider that this is best addressed while working with raw data. Almost all postings in other forums that attempt to educate newbies about the benefits of shooting raw mention white balance adjustment as a primary benefit. This is the first time I've heard someone who I consider to be an expert suggest otherwise.

[jsachs]

For most cameras, raw data is not affected by the camera WB setting, although it is recorded in the file and then re-applied in the raw converter. I almost always shoot with WB set to daylight as auto white balance will otherwise remove the character of the light, at least for landscape photography. I prefer PWP's color balance and multi color balance transformations when I do want to adjust the white balance as I find the color temperature, green/magenta sliders less intuitive than using the color wheel. Not to say there is anything wrong with adjusting it in the raw converter. Unlike highlight and shadow recovery which can only be done properly on raw files, white balance can be just as easily adjusted after conversion.

[doug]

Thanks for the additional knowledge Jonathan.
I did know that the in-camera white balance setting does not affect the raw data. Any refinements of the color balance are done during the conversion or post conversion processes. But I just took it on faith that done as part of conversion produced a more faithful outcome if, for example, you used a white balance target to probe. Assumed it was similar to your comment about noise reduction producing a better result when it is manipulating raw data. Glad to always learn something new.

With respect to camera settings that do not affect raw data, I conducted some experiments a few months ago with the Active D Lighting setting (Nikon's terminology) that I had never employed. As I suspected, I discovered that it too did not seem to affect the raw data, just how the data is interpreted while generating an output image.

[jsachs]

The probe in PWP's Color Balance transformation does the same thing as the probe in the raw converter. As long as you are working with 16-bit data, the results should be more or less identical.

[tonygamble]

Not to say there is anything wrong with adjusting it in the raw converter. Unlike highlight and shadow recovery which can only be done properly on raw files, white balance can be just as easily adjusted after conversion.

However if our OP does try Qimage Ultimate I would advocate getting the WB to his taste as the very first action on the RAWs. This is because QU attempts to guess the right exposure and contrast settings for you. My experience shows these guesses change quite a lot depending on the WB chosen. Of course you can over-ride the exposure/contrast to your taste before converting the RAW but the chances of QU getting it right and you leaving them untouched are improved by sorting the WB first. I do a lot of theatre work. It is tempting to leave the images warm. In my experience the tonal range is much improved by using RAW WB which cools them and gives a greater range of colours

But this may be a peculiarity to QU as I have no idea how software like DXO 'guesses'.

Tony

[doug]

The probe in PWP's Color Balance transformation does the same thing as the probe in the raw converter. As long as you are working with 16-bit data, the results should be more or less identical.

I just tested that. Not that I didn't believe you. But wanted to verify for myself. In my raw converter of choice, probed the Whibal card in an image and saved that WB-adjusted result as 16-bit tiff. Then converted the same raw with NO white balance adjustment and also saved that result as a 16-bit tiff. Then probed the Whibal card in that second image in PWP's Color Balance Transform. Could not see any difference between the two WB-adjusted results when when "eyeballed". But ran a Composite>Absolute Difference comparison of the two results and that did detect differences. But as said before, they were too small to be apparent in a visual comparison.

What that seems to mean is that a 16-bit tiff saved from a raw conversion (prior to manipulations in the editing functions of the raw processor) contains all the relevant information for PWP to use that would otherwise be used within the raw processor. Contrary to popular belief, it may NOT be critical to conduct many of the popular adjustments while still in the raw processor. They can be done just as effectively in PWP as long as you retain deep bit depth data. I think this information is an important side benefit of this thread

[croos]

Contrary to popular belief, it may NOT be critical to conduct many of the popular adjustments while still in the raw processor. They can be done just as effectively in PWP as long as you retain deep bit depth data. I think this information is an important side benefit of this thread

Couldn't this be because RAW converters have "evolved" to more than RAW processors? Many of them are full fledged editors now. Or maybe they are editors that also can process RAW files... It seems to me people don't always distinguish between RAW and post processing. Some may not know the difference. And, unlike me, they are afraid to ask. ;-)

I've read a lot of reviews lately. More often than not a RAW processor is dissed because it lacks or has sub par features that even I know isn't part of RAW processing. They are all compared to the Adobe bundle, which is the benchmark. And the reviews have been named "10 best RAW processors" or similar. Not "10 Best Photo Editors". Annoyingly the reviews I found often didn't talk very much about the RAW part at all.

[doug]

It seems to me people don't always distinguish between RAW (conversion) and post processing. Some may not know the difference. And, unlike me, they are afraid to ask. ;-)

BINGO! IMHO

[tonygamble]

Couldn't this be because RAW converters have "evolved" to more than RAW processors?

Quite right croos. Speaking personally there are actions that QU attempts to do but which are much better done in PWP.

But remember the three points listed by JS. If you don't do them before you start work in PWP it could easily be too late.

1) exposure adjustment, including highlight and shadow recovery - this does things you can't do in PWP after the conversion.
2) lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting) - you could do these in PWP, but not automatically
3) noise reduction - some forms of noise reduction work better on raw files

Blow a highlight, over darken a shadow and no amount of work with PWP will recover them.

Something else to consider is just how fast you can work from file to file in PWP. It is worth taking time to understand 'workflow' wherin you can take a batch photos and apply one or more identical correction. My main contention with QU is that the developer and his two henchmen supporters are not like me with a hundred plus shots from an event to process to a good enough standard for web viewing. Looking at my office wall I see that every framed A2 print has started with QU but had some PWP work done on it.

I'm about to take a two week holiday in the Far East. I expect to come back with about a thousand shots from my Ricoh GR3. When I get back it will be a good time to experiment with doing less in QU and more in PWP. I'll get my WB sorted in QU. I'll get it to export nice flat shots with nothing lost at either end. I know it knows the Ricoh lens. Noise reduction I'll leave it to deal with. I'll then use PWP to balance the exposure and zap up the tonal range. For this I use Grey - Levels and Colour. As long as I can move from frame to frame quickly I will have a faster routine than doing it in QU

EDIT.

One thing we have not mentioned is sharpening. I think that JS will confirm that all RAWs need a bit of sharpening. In my case I get QU to do it. Would JS recommend that we run something like the Bilateral Sharpening on all the images with PWP?