Amazing photo recovery!

Hi everybody. Recently I took a photo of the children playing and forgot the camera in S mode, and since there was not enough light, the result was this



Lukily I had also left the camera in raw and having seen recovery examples, I thought to keep the file and see what can I do with it. To my amazement the result with Capture NX is this and it's dead easy, done only with exposure correction and levels



Afterwards I saved the original dark photo as jpeg and tried to do the same and see what the result would be if I was not shootig raw but jpegs. Finally I got almost the same result but with much more effort and having to play with color correction and saturation levels.



Of course if you see the 100% crops they're nothing to write home about (left the crops without any NR intentionally) and you'll also notice that the raw is much better (though a little noisier) ,the jpeg seems to lose its color in some areas-notice the green grass on the right side. But I'm still amazed by how decent such a bad photo can become (and how easily if it is shot in raw)

raw crop 100%



jpeg crop 100%



Regards Alex

Wow.

--
Some of my photography...

http://www.pbase.com/connorroelke
Feel free to comment anything! It's always apreciated.

Thanks for sharing these Alex. NX was a bit of a learning curve for me, but I am liking it more and more as I use it. What a lovely area for the children to play in. I would love to explore some there too.
--
Joanna
http://keemra.smugmug.com

(nt)

I just took the almost black tiny jpeg you posted here and put it in free Irfanview. I simply pressed "shift U" And magically the photo appeared.

What happened here is not the magic of RAW or NX's abilities. It's simply the fact that you shot in ISO200. A very under exposed picture in ISO 200 has quite a lot of info hidden in the shadows.

If you want to see how this phenomena DOESN'T work try the same thing at ISO1600. (I do it all the time- it looks terrible) The info simply isn't there to recover no matter whether you shot RAW or Jpeg. NX will struggle it's butt off trying to give you something worth showing.

So what I'm trying to say is...
ISO200 underexposed: good
ISO1600 underexposed: Bad

This is NOT proof for NEF versus jpeg. And before anyone wants to crucify me, before you do, please try to take a seriosly underexposed photo at both ISO200 and ISO1600 and see for yourself.

Guy Moscoso

The ability to quickly press "shift U" in Irfanview is wonderful when sorting pictures. You can quickly see if a seriously underexposed picture is worth keeping after basically one button press (the key combination is a single movement for me).

But I repeat, the results of most of my underexposed pictures are mostly poopoo because most of my shooting is at ISO1600. But sometimes there is something interesting hidden in the shadows that is worth keeping

By the way, this "shift U" is like photoshop "auto levels". Sometimes it works better than the photoshop routine.

Guy

I have been sold on RAW after reading on this board and experiencing it for myself. This just confirms my hunch.

No question that trying to recover an underexposed shot at ISO1600 will look a lot worse than one shot at ISO 200 due to all the added noise, however it is RAW that allows this ammount of adjustment at all. The sensors gather information at a 12 bit resolution. This is preserved with RAW but truncated to 8 bits with JPEG. If you are trying to recover shadows that have been truncated to black or highlights that have been truncated to white, there is no way to recover it. I have made some truely boneheaded mistakes with exposure at times and when I have done this with RAW I am always amazed at how much adjustment you can make with excellent results - way more than with JPEG. For this reason I shoot RAW in critical situations (when I remember), even though I usually shoot JPEG for convenience.

Bill

AT the request of the OP I will remove these examples.

Here is a 2 second fix in Irfanview. From the time I click on the picture to the time I'm finished with PP (I used the 76kilobyte example provided by the OP)

I then did the same thing with photoshop using it's autolevels control. It took a minute to load photoshop then do the PP.

I was going to ask people to try it themselves but I don't think anywone would actually try it so I did it.

Guy Moscoso

Two second fix in free Irfanview:



One minute fix in photoshop

I agree with Bill on this, plus the powerful NX over Canon CR2 software, allow me to add one or more local Control points thus adding in small/medium brightness/Contrast where I want to only manipulate certain areas of the picture.
--

-is easily so much better it would be worth my time to do it . . .

But then, there's no 'start-up' time for me, because it's 'on' all the time anyway . . .

-Also doesn't look like a minutes worth of work to me, either . . . just a matter of efficiency, i bet.
--
David



. . . shoot like there's no film in the thing!