Advice to owners of RAW-enabled Powershot: SHOOT RAW !!!
Jan 5, 2013
5
Hi all,
I still own -and use a lot- a G11.
More than one year ago I bought my first DSLR (a 600d) and, since then, I have learned to use, more and more, Digital Photo Professional.
After that, back to the G11, I have switched to RAW with it, as well, editing its shots with DPP.
Now I would really like to take the time to give an advice to all the owners of RAW-enabled Powershots: for good photos, don't shoot jpg, SHOOT RAW !!!
You don't even have to "lose too much time" with DPP: just open with it a 'standard' RAW shot, set at least the picture style to "faithful", the Peripheral Illumination Correction I would say between 70 and 100, the contrast (try -3) and the sharpness (try +9) and keep the rest to default zero; save these setting in a "recipe file" as a general one for your camera: it will be a .vrd file - for example for me I have my G11.vrd.
Then, every time you get back home with your memory card full of RAWS, just plug it in your pc, have DPP open the SD folder, select all your RAWS in it and then choose "Read and paste recipe from file ..." choosing your one and applying its settings to all the shots your have in your SD ... and never mind for any damage: with DPP you can always revert to shot settings!
After that, just ask DPP to "File - Batch process ... " all these raws, choosing a destination folder on your hard disk where it will store the converted jpgs - it will direcly read RAWS from the memory card and write the resulting jpgs to your hard drive.
Il will take time, but it's batch, and you can leave it work by itself.
In the end you will find resulting jpgs (at least to my eyes, at least with my G11) with an astonishing difference.
Place your camera on a tripod and compare your "standard" jpgs with these ones.
At low ISOs, results are really comparable to those of any entry level DSLR, and at High ISO the benefit on noise is very high.
The four settings I have mentioned before (Picture Style, P.I.C., contrast and sharpness) are in my opinion "neutral", and can be batch-applied to any shot without problems. Of course you can't do that with many of the others.
But, with those others, you will see what kind of results you will be able to get by setting for instance the colors in the white balance "color temperature" slider, or by adjusting the shadows and highlights at the best for your shots.
And, of course, before batch-converting the RAWS, you can also easily rotate and crop them (and also these settings, even if saved in the raws, are always recoverable!)
I adore DPP, and I have been so glad to see it provides such a wonderful service even to Powershots !
And If you have an old version of DPP on your CDs, do upgrade it from the Canon site it to a more recent version (3.12.x or so) and you will also have a good HDR tool for free!
ciao a tutti
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