RAW was never meant for the average user to access which is why
there developed a whole "cottage industry" of utilities to enable
RAW format to be read. Only recently have the some Photoediting
packages and manufacturer's camera software begun to offer any
support for it at all!
Huh? RAW support has been around for years... Bibble and Qimage Pro
(two very powerful photo editing packages) had it back in 2000.
Minolta, Canon, and Olympus Nikon have had RAW converters since way
back when. Here's a like showing Canon's RAW converter for the D30
(back in 2000).
The problem that I see is that if the camera doesn't produce the
best results straight out of the camera then perhaps it is not very
welll engineered.
Again, I don't think you really understand that NO camera can
produce the best results. If you've ever read any articles of
darkroom technique, you would result that a LOT of work is done
after the photo like adjusting contrast or burn/dodge elements in
the photo. In the instance of burns/dodging, it is impossible for
any camera to selectively adjust the amount of exposure for
different parts of the images to yield a more 'artistically'
interesting photo... the camera has no sense of this.
If one of the advantages of digital cameras in general is 'speed'
then isn't it a huge waste of time to have to make those sort of
adjustments that should have been made in the camera in the first
place?
Like I mentioned before... speed is good, but you can't always take
it to the extreme because you will be sacrificing other things in
the process. It is a tradeoff between speed and quality. You
wouldn't want every chef in the world to throw out their cooking
wares and heat everything with a microwave just because it's fast
would you?
Providing the option allows "some people" to give up some speed so
that they might get a slight gain in quality. This is obviously not
for everyone as "most" people prefer speed/convenience. However,
for those select few who are willing to spend the extra time, and
have the proper ability... RAW format gives them that flexibility.
I sdon't think we are talking about any great 'creativity' involved
in playing with RAW format images...it is just a way of by-passing
lousy in-camera processing...which is...a workaround for a camera
problem and not a feature to be wished for if your camera doesn't
need it.
Not really, with the RAW format you get superior control over the
as you get the "raw" data. This allow you manipulate a LOT, for
instance suppose you are doing B and W photography and want to
intensify the sky like if you were to use a yellow or even red 72A
filter. With the raw data you can do this more easily and with
better results than JPEG. Without going to deeply into the details,
the discrete cosine transformation (DCT) compression scheme used by
JPEG kind of mixes up all the data into a hodge podge. Processing
this data is rather hard to do after the fact - in particular
retrieving highlight/shadow detail, it would be like deciding half
way through that you want less sugar in your cake mix (how would
you go about removing sugar from the mix?).
It's too bad I can't post some excerpts from the photo technique
magazines that I have or even my book about Ansel Adams's most
famous photo where he goes step by step on how took a great photo
and made an amazing image from it in the darkroom... but here is an
example look at this photo of the "Grand Tetons and the Snake River"
http://www.anseladams.com/
Nice image right? Well this is basically impossible to do coming
straight out of the camera. You see how the mountain kind of pop
out at you beyond the glowing sky with the dark ominous clouds?
That effect was done with a lot of darkroom work, in particular I
suspect Adams burned in the clouds a bit and maybe dodged the
center a bit. Are you telling me this is is not 'great creativity'?
Most people don't have the vision and skill to do something like
this, let alone a machine... now this "can" be done with JPEG, but
it is even better with RAW. The analogy would be to like the
difference between working with a pre-print (making a copy from a
copy) or working with the original negative.
--Arvin
