Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

frascati wrote:

A different tack on this question. The manual offers precious little on Raw shooting beyond where to find the option to enable it. I searched the web and this forum and am still not clear on how to set up raw for shooting.

Well, that's most of it for the shooting part.

Which settings does RAW override?

jpeg mainly, I like to shoot both with RAW+jpeg

Obviously aperture and shutter speed are in my control. Is that it? White balance? ND filter? Iso settings? Forgive the stupidity here. But I did search and this seems to be one of those questions that most RAW tutorials (all that I found anyway) skip past. Maybe assuming that anyone interested in RAW ought to be sophisticated enough to... "well, if you have to ask, you'll never know". Not the first time I've run into that in web tutorials broadly.

Hmm, well, you can usually still set them all on the camera, of the ones you listed only the white balance wouldn't be reflected in the RAW file.  Some other settings that wouldn't show up in the RAW are any of the arty filters and sharpening.  Just ask on any other particulars.  ND filter, and ISO will apply.  You will notice that the noise initially looks much worse in the RAW file because no noise reduction has been done, the advantage is that you can fine tune the denoising and pick from a range of algorithms to get the right balance between noise reduction and detail retention.

I may be obsessing over this camera since it was, for me, relatively expensive. I researched the hell out of it before buying, and my initial impressions of its EQ are dispiriting.

I'm worried about its IQ compared to my older SL420 right out of the box. In Smart, or Program mode with menu options, white balance AWB, Iso on Auto, etc, pretty much base-lined, out of the box it really frightened me. I've got another thread posted concerning this. Am probably embarrassing myself in the haste to determine whether it's the camera model, me, or a lemon. I need to come to some decision by the beginning of next week.

Hmm, mind posting some samples jpegs?

As that other thread progresses it's mostly me (misapprehending some white balance control in auto modes), but I've yet to be happy with anything coming out of the camera in jpeg, and my first forays into RAW are even scarier.

Mind posting some sample RAWs for me to take a shot at processing?

Again, my only base for comparison are four years owning the smaller sensor, auto only, SL420. Using Samsung's conversion software that came with the EX2F (how bad can it be for comparison's sake?) and selecting from among a few of the drop down options, default, fine street, landscape, etc, the results truly look like hell.

O.o !?!? what software is that?  Filters are probably the last thing to look at for a photo, there's other things that need to be done in the processing first.

I won't embarrass myself further here by posting them. But I'm in a bit of a rush over the weekend to decide what to do with this camera if, despite all advice and input (literal and figurative), it is incapable of satisfying even the SL420's benchmarks... those being a harddrive full of photos from that old camera.

I don't see any reason for the results to be worse than the SL420, that seems really strange to me.  For the samples you post, it would also be helpful if you could say what you don't like about the shot, and maybe a corresponding SL420 shot that you do like?

Thanks

Brad Williamson