Worth shooting in raw, since cameras sharpen better than computers now?

[Gintaras]

Sharpness aside, shooting in RAW makes all the sense in the world when you consider how much control it gives you over every aspect of your exposure (with the possible exception of crappy composition )

Composition you can fix with crop. What you can not fix - out of focus photos...and prolly overexposed ones...

Agreed, except there is no reason not to do it and every reason to do it....setting it lower doesn't affect file size yet will hurt you if you ever need to make a print down the road. Better to just always use 300 ppi and leave options open later, especially if you delete the raw file and can't reproccess which some people do to save space.

For web, I crop without looking at measurements in inches or pixels neither I look at ppi...When I want to print photo, I do crop with measurements in inches - size I do want to print and then I set @ 300ppi.

I do save all originals - RAW & JPEGs. I'm not that good at editing right now. I do save for the future, in case I'll learn more PS or RAW editing and can make same photo better, who knows. Delete files is easy, and HDDs doesn't cost that much nowadays to make backups.
It's just my preferences for my hobby....

 

[waterjug]

http://i.imgur.com/Gi6lReL.jpg

I manipulated the above picture in LR5 and crop to get the last result.

WB
+8 temperature
+25 tint

Tone
-24 black

Presence
+40 clarity
+40 vibrant
+40 saturation

Sharpening
25 amount
1.6 radius
25 detail
20 masking

Noise Reduction
50 luminance
50 detail

Post-crop vignetting
Highlight priority
+5 amount
50 midpoint
50 feather

Radial filter 1
-1.00 exposure
100 contrast
-31 clarity
-31 saturation
-29 sharpness
60 feather

Radial filter 2
80 contrast
100 clarity
50 feather
Invert mask

Thanks! Where were the radial filters...I see there's two...

 

[iGas]

Thanks! Where were the radial filters...I see there's two...

Anything less than LR 5.0 do not have radial filter. And, I happened to use 2 filters but you can achieve the same or similar result with just 1 filter.

 

[AkumaX]

ooo i wanna try too!!

3.56MB original, imgur resized to 728KB

(just messing around w/ sharpening/NR sliders, a little bit of shadows/exposure and less highlights/whites)

 

[waterjug]

Anything less than LR 5.0 do not have radial filter. And, I happened to use 2 filters but you can achieve the same or similar result with just 1 filter.

I meant where did you use them in the picture

 

[CuriousMike]

Nice! Remarkable the sharpness that was maintained with such a dramatic decrease in filesize.

ooo i wanna try too!!

3.56MB original, imgur resized to 728KB

(just messing around w/ sharpening/NR sliders, a little bit of shadows/exposure and less highlights/whites)

 

[iGas]

I meant where did you use them in the picture

over the bird

 

[glen]

I used a brush on the bird to lower the exposure on just the white part of his neck. Otherwise, that part would be blown out, losing all detail, when I set the black, whites, and expose to my liking.

 

[MrSquished]

never shot in raw for the sharpening options in PP but for the other ones. it's simple if you want the best results and can PP fast, RAW gives you non destructive data to work with. sure JPEG can serve a lot of casual shooters a lot of the time so go for it, but if you PP there is no reason to shoot JPEG.

 

[JerryOneMillion]

If you are happy with your cameras jpegs, then it pretty much ends the discussion for you. But to say that computers can't do what cameras can do is false. Some cameras sharpness and noise setting are applied to the RAW file and that can limit your results. The advantages of shooting RAW are: The ability to optimize the settings (sharpness, noise, WB, Exp, and so on) for the characteristics of each unique photo. The ability to control these aspects either 'locally' or 'globally' in a file helps you make the most of each shot and better depict your vision. If you think that a "One Setting Fits All Shots" approach works better for every shot than what you might get with independent control based on the characteristics of the shot, I would suggest you are mistaken. The optimal sharpness/noise setting is rather dependent on the size and manner of the 'output'. So if you are printing a couple of 5x7's or 8x10's to be viewed in the hands at arms length, or shots for the web or a 32x40 poster the optimal settings are not the same. If 'good enough' is what you have, then you needn't go any further. These settings, which directly affect IQ, have far more latitude on a RAW file than on a jpeg. Starting with a good RAW capture and using 'non destructive editing' you create the least limiting scenario. A jpeg file simply has less latitude, less flexibility, less data. In post you can sharpen and then set the masking level, which is something you can't do in camera. Every camera has a limited dynamic range, so in many shots you may wish to 'lift' the shadows, while in another you may want to recover some of the highlight range. This ability to 'shift' or expand the range of light beyond what you captured is very important. There are programs that allow you to adjust the sharpness of 'surfaces' or the sharpness of 'edges' but in all these cases it is 'adjust to taste' - So if you are satisfied with the jpegs you get from your camera, that's a good stopping point! For others, who seek to potentially maximize every discrete control point under their command (not just sharpness and noise) to produce the strongest image they can...Well those folks will ALWAYS shoot RAW. Once you master a decent processing software (LightRoom, Aperture, Silky Pix, DXO) you should be able to do better than your camera in most cases. The only penalties to shooting in RAW are the file size and the time spent at the computer. If you think you also loose IQ when you shoot RAW then you are a minority indeed!

 

[Berliner]

...

Yes!

Even Waterjug seems to be convinced of the RAW route already

 

[info@prophoto]

Do you like this better?

There are many technical parameters that need to be taken into account. I personally consider that this image is of superior quality. Being a photographer also entails making some difficult choices and weighing various alternatives. You can mostly learn by doing, by trial and error. This is the only way to get better at choosing materials and equipment.

 

[waterjug]

After a couple months all I have to say is, Raw all the way...wow. LR takes maybe a couple days to get the hang of, and as I learn about new features I can go back and take a second look or do more to photos I had previously edited. Love it love it love it

 

[iGas]

Congrats,

An old photography saying, "a good photographer is measure by the size of his darkroom garbage can".

It mean that, to become a good photographer, one must spend endless amount of time processing & develop his picture.

 

[waterjug]

Congrats,

An old photography saying, "a good photographer is measure by the size of his darkroom garbage can".

It mean that, to become a good photographer, one must spend endless amount of time processing & develop his picture.

yeah, the learning process was far from smooth, but with the RAW it doesn't matter because it's so easy to undo!

 

[AViking]

Question to those that might understand this better.

I went to a photography seminar the other day and got a bit confused. Was in Swedish and the guy talked fast so lets see if I got this right.

He said that if you're doing the sharpening in Lightroom or Bridge that's simply correcting sharpening at a camera level. Whatever that means. So you do that at it's most basic level at either high frequency (landscape) or low frequency (faces) before anything. Then you can export into Photoshop to do the real sharpening using either Unsharp mask (old way) or the far more effective smart sharpen. I think that would be the name in English. It's basically a Gaussian correction vs something else.

Then after that you would sharpen for print.

Am I understanding this correctly? Is there a good source to read about this stuff? How should I be sharpening my images?

 

[trenchfoot]

Question to those that might understand this better.

I went to a photography seminar the other day and got a bit confused. Was in Swedish and the guy talked fast so lets see if I got this right.

He said that if you're doing the sharpening in Lightroom or Bridge that's simply correcting sharpening at a camera level. Whatever that means. So you do that at it's most basic level at either high frequency (landscape) or low frequency (faces) before anything. Then you can export into Photoshop to do the real sharpening using either Unsharp mask (old way) or the far more effective smart sharpen. I think that would be the name in English. It's basically a Gaussian correction vs something else.

Then after that you would sharpen for print.

Am I understanding this correctly? Is there a good source to read about this stuff? How should I be sharpening my images?

I've read some pretty good articles on sharpening, especially with the last two versions of PS. What I've found from trial and error though is that for the most part, it's a more a matter of when to sharpen and less so with what type of sharpening to use. To really get the most out of PS sharpening, I use both unsharp mask and smart sharpen on the same photo along with the sharpening brush. When to use them in the process chain mostly depends on what type of photo I'm dealing with, and what kind of plug-ins I'm using in the shot.

Generally speaking, I use a small amount of smart sharpening somewhere in the beginning of PP, then use sharpening brush in the middle and finish up with unsharp mask after noise removal.

If it's just a snapshot I'm working with then I'd omit smart sharpen completely, do a little dabbing here and there with sharpening brush being careful not to halo anything while I'm working around high contrast areas of the shot, run the noise reduction tool and do a 60/20 unsharp mask and adjust accordingly for a quickie dress up.

edit - Whenever I do sharpening, I magnify and concentrate on edge blending to get the right "look".