RAW vs JPEG: it’s not a decision for life

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

I’m fed up of reading the bunkum that is written in articles about whether you should shoot in RAW or JPEG on your digital camera. Thousands of column inches have been devoted to the pros and cons. I hope you read all those articles because I won’t be wasting my time repeating them here.

The long and the short of it is that RAW vs JPEG is a choice, not a war. Too many people feel the need to draw a conclusion as to which format they have finally settled on, and then blindly shoot in that format going forward.

I recently lent a camera to a young aspiring photographer at my cricket club and forgot to switch the capture to JPEG from RAW. She spent the afternoon taking images of the batsmen and then handed me back the camera. I was distraught to find that all 600+ images had been taken in RAW.
(more…)

The digital camera that makes babies happy

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Those clever camera manufacturers will stop at nothing to enhance our lives, and increase the already near-unbearable mirth of the everyday, by means of clever electronics. And so to London’s Imagination Gallery this afternoon, where Samsung was showing off its latest round of cameras. The most interesting of which sports not one screen, but quite literally double that number. Yes that’s right, two screens! One on the back (soooo last season) and one implausibly positioned (hold on to your seats) at the front. And look how happy it seems! (more…)

Three Steps to Punchier Christmas Photos

Friday, December 26th, 2008

New digital camera? Good stuff. But hold your horses: you should learn how to use three simple software tools, which you can apply to almost all your photos and which is almost guaranteed to improve them. None of them takes more than a few seconds and they can enhance the look of the dreariest shot immensely. Those steps are known as levels, saturation and sharpening.
So load up the photo-editing software that you’ve no doubt got lurking on your hard disk somewhere. If you haven’t got any, download a nice free copy of the GIMP, which despite the name is a free photo-editing package, not something your ISP should be blocking. We’re going to use GIMP 2.6 for the shots here. Most other photo editors – including Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS4 – are more or less identical as far as the way these basic tools work.

(more…)

Just in: Nikon Capture NX2

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Being a Canon man I’ve never been tempted by Capture NX before, but the press launch last week convinced me I should give it a whirl. Despite the name, it’s a proper digital photography workflow package with tagging and powerful processing tools, and the new version is being aimed more at the mainstream than professionals.

Unfortunately though, I’ll never use it, for one simple reason.

(more…)

Stop! Please! (aka Spot the Difference)

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

The image you see above is the result of a small torrent of Canon IXUS cameras that cascaded into the office today. There’s an IXUS 80 IS; an IXUS 85 IS; an IXUS 90 IS; and an IXUS 970 IS.

You’ll notice they all look rather similar. (more…)

Megapixels are Dead

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Finally got my hands on Canon’s latest addition to its DSLR range, the EOS 450D, at the end of last week. Am always keen to see the new models in this particular range since I own a 350D, which is now three years old.

My 350D produces 8 million pixels; the 450D 12.2 million. So here’s a 100% crop of two shots I took with the two cameras, roughly 20 seconds apart. I used the same lens (a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di), at the same exposure settings (1/80th of a second at f/8) – click to enlarge them to full size:

Both were taken in RAW mode and processed in Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional application with identical default settings – same white balance, same sharpness, same contrast, same everything. I think you’ll agree, the difference in detail is less than obvious. The shot on the right – the 450D – is a little larger in size of course, but the actual rendition of detail is as near identical as makes no odds. (more…)