Schonhose

Just the other day I had a lively discussion with a friend of mine about photography. One of the points we discussed is the RAW vs JPEG issue, which is haunting so many people out there. Well, here is my take on the whole RAW vs JPEG issue.

I shoot RAW, it is an essential part of my preprocessing. At the early stages I shot primarily JPEG, but I found I was limited in my preprocessing using Adobe Photoshop. With the arrival of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom working with RAW files became so much easier and allows me to really push it to the limit in terms of preprocessing. Learn more about RAW @ Wikipedia.

Let me make it clear, I’m not against JPEG. If you’re the type of guy/girl that only wants to make nice pictures and do not care about preprocessing then JPEG is definitely the way to go. However, in my humble opinion (and I’m sure people will hate me for saying this): don’t use a fancy DSLR just to shoot JPEGs. It will be like using a Ferrari to do grocery shopping at the store just around the corner. Sure, it works (depending on the amount of groceries, there isn’t much space left in a Ferrari) but you’re not using the car to its full potential.

One of the major arguments of my friend to not use RAW is the space it occupies. This a non-argument, prices of both storage cards and hard drives are really low. Space is not an issue anymore. Another argument he had is more or less valid. Processing RAW, especially when you have a lot, it time consuming and the effects are not always eminent.

My feeling and experience is that shooting RAW puts lots more control at your fingertips than using JPEG. Instead of letting the camera decide what is good, you can make you’re own decisions. Perhaps you don’t know this, but if you use JPEG your camera makes some predefined decisions about boosting colors and other preprocessing steps and save the image in a lossy compression file format. Besides loosing perhaps valuable information you need if you do want to edit your image, you have to live with what the camera thinks is right. And to be honest, on average the camera will get it right. But there are some situations the law of averages does not work out well.

But to each his own, I’ll just continue shooting RAW and by doing so, spend a considerably amount of time doing preprocessing. It is, after all, my choice.

I’m an avid fan of the work of Scott Kelby and a frequent visitor of his blog. I purchased the 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 book he wrote to set up a workflow for Adobe Photoshop. In that particular post I also mentioned I needed to setup a good workflow for Lightroom as well.

With the release of Lightroom 2.0 Scott has updated his book to the latest version of Lightroom. So I decided to buy this version and have a stab at setting up the workflow. It finally arrived in my mail today and I’m pretty excited to get started on it.

Read more about the book over at Kelby Training. I consider it a must-have ever since reading the 7 point system for Photoshop.

I just got back from a visit to Rome, the capital of Italy and I made tons of pictures of the city architecture. We had some nice weather but there were times the sky looked a dull grey with clouds. This has lead to multiple pictures with a “washed out” sky look. I’m quite aware this could be prevented by using a graduated filter (ND filter) but I never got around in buying some.

Besides, there would be to much hassle because you would have to have at least three types of filters: one-third, half and two-third. To top things of even more you would have a variety of densities as well. I can only imagine the filter swapping while making pictures.

However, in the mean time I’m still stuck with dull boring skies and I really want to fix that. After trying some stuff I was stuck and decided to read some feeds from my feedreader. Much to my amazement I saw a post by Matt Kloskowski about a set of presets for graduated filters he has released into the wild for Lightroom 2.x. Needless to say I downloaded and installed the presets in Lightroom.

The effect it had on most of the photos was amazing. The skies showed some more detail and didn’t look nearly as dull as they had before. Here is an example from Matt himself. I’m definitely incorporating these filters in my workflow!

Over at Adobe Labs there was an announcement yesterday detailing the immediate release of the new RC2.1 (release candidate) for Lightroom to the community. They feel it is stable enough but it could use some more testing by the community.

This update fixes some issues I was having with Lightroom (I didn’t blog about them because they were well known).

• Memory leaks in the Library and Develop modules decreased Lightroom performance.
• Folder synchronizing could experience significant performance decreases.

Read more about this release over at the Adobe Labs page.

Today I have received my copy of Lightroom v2.0 by mail. Since I choose not to participate in the beta-testing all new features are really new. I’ve spend most of the evening figuring out “what does this button do?” (And yes, that is indeed DeeDee from Dexter’s lab )

It only took about a month to have the new Lightroom in stock for the stores in my country, which is pretty fast considering the normal pace we get stuff from the US. However, with the internet you would have expected a faster update.

Anyway, I’ll just continue to figure out things in the new version (the adjustment brush is amazing!) and the waiting begins for the local stores to carry the Lightroom v2 book by Scott Kelby. It has been on my wishlist for sometime. Currently it is for sale in the US for $39 and I wouldn’t be surprised if they sell it for €39. It never cease to amaze me how this stuff works in real life.