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.

Stop listening to all the static that is talked about RAW and start relying on your own skill and judgement

Why ever would you want to shoot local amateur sport in RAW? There are bound to be any number of good shots available and for 99% of those, the camera will have done a great job of exposing the result. The results were going on the cricket club’s Flickr Page and even if a “magic image” been missed because of poor exposure, so what? It’s local amateur sport and there are another 600 odd images to choose from.

I, however, had an afternoon of wading through each image and then having to process each one through Adobe Bridge… what a waste of time!

RAW is a tool for the photographer, just like a tripod or a flash. Use it when it will help to create a great image; avoid it when all it’s doing is adding to the time it will take to process the images, or consume more space on your storage and backup media. Make an educated choice based on the pros and cons of each image, don’t stick to one setting religiously.

Stop listening to all the static that is talked about RAW and start relying on your own skill and judgement. That’s what sets pros apart from amateurs.

Ewen Rankin is a photographer and runs The Bagel Tech podcast network.

Not quite as daft an idea as I’d initially thought, though. A highly scientific survey of Facebook that I just conducted has revealed that 32.3% of all photos contain the picture-taker themself, in that highly endearing cuddling-up-to-your-other-half/friend/total stranger, sticking your arm out and taking the picture backwards sort of way. The screen on the front of the ST500 and ST550 models lets you do it without taking half a dozen shots of the tops of your heads first. Obviously, in the picture you see on the left, all the front screen is showing is a picture of a camera. This is because I was taking a picture of it at the time. Imagine, instead, a happy scene with laughter and smiling.

But wait, there’s more! Not only will the front-mounted screen mirror what the lens can see, it’ll do other things too. It’ll show you a numerical countdown for self-timer shots, or a happy smiling face to indicate to your friends exactly when the camers is about to take the shot, so they can pretend to be happy too, and smile.

Best of all, it will (if Samsung is to be believed) make your children photogenic no matter what. It will manage this trick by showing a terrifically cute animation of a clown on the front screen, thus ensuring the little blighter darling will be enraptured, smile delightedly and radiate angelic photo-friendly happiness at just the right moment.

There’s even going to be a facility to download new animations to the camera, which will – as our Samsung spokesman so eloquently intoned – “reinvigorate the product in terms of the child mode function”. Indeed.

Also on the agenda were Samsung’s newest camcorders, reviews of which will be gracing this site soon. Apparently, while the sale of hard-disk camcorders has been falling, flash-memory-based ones are on the up. And little wonder given their small size. And also their ruggedness, since according to our Samsung man, “a hard-drive product, you shake it about and the needle will skip”.

Well, quite.

Levels
This can be the single most effective edit you can apply to a photo, particularly one that’s not been brilliantly exposed. If the exposure isn’t perfect – and sometimes even if it is – the tonal range of a digital photo can be clumped into a narrow area. In a digital photo, pixels are represented as numbers, so the idea is to expand the tonal range so it covers as much of the numeric range available as possible. The effect of expanding the range is to give shots much more punch and contrast. It’s easier to do than to explain, see head to the GIMP and select Tools | Colour Tools | Levels.
In the Input Levels box, you’ll see a lumpy graph. This is the histogram of the image, which shows the number of pixels in the image at each intensity: pure black on the extreme left, up to pure white on the far right, with the greys in between. The higher the hill the more pixels at that level of brightness. If the ‘foothills’ of the graph on either side don’t reach to the edges, the image is ripe for a bit of levels tweaking.

Drag the left-hand arrow beneath the histogram to the point at which the foothills begin on the left, and then drag the right-hand arrow on the right to the point at which the foothills begin on the right, thusly:

You may find that when you drag the right-hand arrow in, things get excessively bright: it depends on the image. If it does, drag the arrow back a little bit. When you hit OK, the tonal range of the image is expanded by pulling dark greys down to black and off-whites up to bright white.
If you’ve done it right, the difference between the before and after versions of the images should be quite marked. With a badly exposed image it can look as if a veil has been lifted from the shot and everything is much clearer. Here’s a genuine example of a before and after, showing the difference it can make – levels was the only edit we applied:

Hue/Saturation
This is where you can cheat a little bit and make your pictures better than real life by artificially enhancing the colurs. Levels gives your images punch and increasing the saturation – in other words the richness of the colours – can add nicely to that effect. The key with this one – as with most effects – is not to overdo it. The effect itself is simple enough to apply in GIMP – just pop to Tools | Colour Tools | Hue/Saturation. Don’t tweak the Hue or Lightness sliders – just tweak the Saturation slider up a bit.:

If you go past 15 you’re probably overdoing it: between 5 and 15 is usually the best range to give the colours a lift:

Sharpness

If you resize a photo down to web size, or you want to print it off at maximum resolution, you’ll find that applying a sharpening routine can really enhance the detail. Somewhat unintuitively, the most effective sharpening tool is called ‘unsharp mask’. In GIMP you’ll find this clever widget in the Filters | Enhance | Unsharp Mask menu.

Before you apply unsharp mask, always zoom your shot into 100%, otherwise you’ll overdo it and not realise. In GIMP just go to View | Zoom and select 1:1 (100%). Again, being sparing is the key to avoiding nasty artefacts. For a print-size (in other words high-resolution shot that you’ve not resized) try a Radius setting of 1.0, Amount at 0.50 and Threshold at 0. For a photo that you’ve downsized for the web – apply the sharpening after the resize – try being a little bit more aggressive. Experimenting is the key but always bear in mind the golden rule of not overdoing it:

And that’s it – these are the three essential adjustments you should make as a matter of course to all your shots. After a bit of practise each step will take only a few seconds, and it’s very well worth the effort.

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

The interface is slick and – although it’s been prone to the odd out-of-memory crash which I’m sure will be fixed by the time it’s available to buy – has some neat tricks like highlight and shadow protection, excellent auto-selection tools and a damn good spot-healing brush. For more on that, look out for a full review later this week.

But the reason I’ll never use it in anger is the fact that it doesn’t support RAW files other than Nikon’s own. So I can’t use it with my thousands of Canon shots. To be fair, Canon is guilty of the same thing with its Digital Photo Professional (DPP) application, but the difference is DPP comes free with its digital SLRs. Capture NX2, on the other hand, will be retailing at around £120.

Nikon itself clearly wasn’t awfully comfortable in answering my question about why it won’t support other RAW formats. The official response was limited to pointing out it works fine with JPEG and TIFF image files, so people can use it with shots taken on other cameras if they convert them first. But that’s hardly the point and renders the majority of the most useful tools like the highlight protection useless, or at least far less effective. NX2 doesn’t even support Adobe’s halfway house, the DNG (digital negative) format.

Digital SLR manufacturers have a powerful weapon in preventing brand defection. Most photography enthusiasts have a hefty investment in lenses and accessories that don’t fit other makes of camera. A Nikon user will tend to stay that way: the same applies to Canon accolytes.

But that logic – which Nikon seems to be applying to NX2 – doesn’t always make sense. Supporting other file formats will help people come to NX2, and Nikon will make money on the sale of the software; not supporting them won’t somehow prevent defection to Canon. If someone’s already made the decision to abandon five grand’s worth of hardware, a piece of software costing a hundred quid is neither here nor there. It’s useless as a lock-in device.

Other sectors of the software industry saw the logic of this years ago and pretty much everyone benefitted. If Nikon – as it claims – wants its software to be a worthwhile standalone tool rather than an accessory for Nikon cameras, it needs to do the same.

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.

You’ll notice they’re all emblazoned with Image Stabilizer and AiAF logos. You’ll notice they all have zoom rings around their shutter buttons.

What you won’t notice purely from the picture is that they all have megapixel ratings between 8 and 10, near-identical menu systems, screens of either 2.5in or 3in, image quality that’s a gnat’s particulars away from the same, and super features like face detection and tracking.

Granted, the 970 IS has a better zoom range, with 5x rather than the 3x of the other three.

But really.

Canon, by all accounts, is one of the top three companies in the world when it comes to R&D. But it seems to be turning into a slave to product lifecycles, which are now almost literally measured in weeks. The press release for the IXUS 80 IS, for instance, dropped into my inbox on 24th January. The release for the IXUS 85 IS arrived on 13th March.

That’s barely a month and a half.

Canon, of course, will argue that the two models are complementary, not competitive. I’d argue that they’re just confusing. The salesman down Tottenham Court Rd would argue to the punter that this one is five better than that one.

Whichever argument you plump for, I’m pretty sure the world could do without at least one of these – admittedly fine – digital cameras. And that’s (literally) not the half of it. Pop over to the IXUS product page on Canon’s website and you’ll see that the current line-up consists of the IXUS 70, IXUS 75, IXUS 80 IS, IXUS 85 IS, IXUS 90 IS, IXUS 860 IS, IXUS 950 IS, IXUS 960 IS and (pause for breath) IXUS 970 IS.

And then there’s the PowerShot range – a further 12 models.

There’s choice, and then there’s sheer bewilderment.

I. Am. Confused.

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.

Which basically proves the point that there’s no sense in worrying about megapixels any more: the limiting factor as far as detail is concerned is far more likely to be your lens or sensor noise, not the number of pixels your camera can spit out.

That’s not to say the newer model is completely devoid of improvements, but I’m certainly not tempted to upgrade my 350D merely on the strength of more pixels.

Moving on from that though, the new model does have 14-bit digital-to-analogue conversion, which theoretically means more colour detail and greater leeway when it comes to heavy editing compared to the 12 bits of the 350D. To wit, here’s the same shot but with the contrast turned up in both (to +4 in DPP):

You can see that 14 bits is better than an extra four megapixels: the 350D shot on the left has started to lose detail to oversaturation, while it’s been retained in the 450D shot.

But is it worth paying £600-odd for a 450D, instead of picking up a new 350D – they’re still around if you look – and a decent extra lens for the same price?

Nah.