Hello everybody!


Quite a striking title eh? Don't worry, I don't have any scandal to reveal to you!


I always found it funny that many of you think that I'm a photoshop expert, a scholar photographer, and that I've always used raw, so I guess it would be constructive to let you know a few things:






And this leads me to the next part of this journal...

RAW vs JPEG - a discovery

I always found RAW files extremely heavy, they made my CPU and hard drive bleed every time I tried to open one, the raw converters were extremely limited, and I always ended up doing everything directly in Paint Shop Pro. Besides that, by doing side-to-side comparisons, I saw that I could achieve what I wanted through jpeg editing, toning and sharpness wise. Everyone around me was shouting "RAW IS BETTER BECAUSE... YES", but my life as always been led by following what I believe in, and the things I believe in are usually those that I've witnessed with my eyes or mind... and this was not the case with RAW.


But time goes on... we get more and more passionate about what we do, we get more demanding with our own works, and we start looking for ways to improve our images. I had heard great things about the new photoshop CS4, and specially about CameraRaw 5.2... I had just bought my Apple Cinema 30 and upgraded my computer, and that was when I thought I should try it once more...


And then I discovered its power! CameraRaw 5.2 adjustments are quite simply amazing, and I found that there are some things about raw that make it fully worth:

More information on each image, allowing bigger margin to do strong levels/contrast editing on it... applying strong local contrast enhancement in some jpeg images (specially the underexposed ones) would sometimes cause banding and posterization (specially in the sky), that would strongly degrade image quality and print output.

Easier adjustment of white balance

Greater flexibility - some amazing adjustments like fill light, clarity, vibrance, brushes, that make the process of making images become alive much easier

The most important to me, the capability of recovering highlights and, specially shadows, with much less noise and image degradation

As such, right now I'm only using RAW, I think it compensates the huge file size and the much bigger CPU demand. I think that jpeg still has its place in photography, and many people should think twice about using raw-only, specially if they aren't thinking of publishing their photos or printing in large sizes. A correctly exposed and post-processed jpeg can be as good as any raw processed file, but raw allows us to have a greater margin of recovery in those images whose exposure didn't get spot on.


I've just bought RealWorld CameraRaw for Photoshop CS4, which many people recommended me, so I'm starting to change a few things I've pointed in the first part of the journal. It's a book about RAW, from a very practical point of view, being very thorough at the same time.


There's still a lot to learn, and I'll keep on searching and trying to improve. Someday I even might become a scholar photographer!

Features

It's always a tremendous pleasure to spend some time selecting the favourites among my favourites. These are works of art that deserve all the exposure they can get!



Go show your support to the amazing artists behind those images!