Hankins Lawrence Images Photonotes Janaury 2004

We haven’t taken many photos so far this year – it’s been way too cold here in Bethesda for us to head out. We’ve really become wimps about the cold since moving to Maryland. When we lived in Wisconsin, we complained a whole lot less about the cold and were much more willing to go out when the temperatures were below freezing.

Despite not taking many photos, we have been busy here at Hankins-Lawrence Images. Just after the first of the year, we opened a store on Ebay. We’ve started by stocking the store with note cards (photos printed onto the card). We’ll be adding photo cards (actual photos mounted into the card frame) and prints in the weeks to come. Please stop and take a look. The store is located at

http://www.stores.ebay.com/hankinslawrenceimages?refid=store

One of our new years resolutions was to finally get caught up on backing up and indexing all of photos. It’s can be a challenge trying to figure out where we have a particular file stored when we want it. We found many of our old back up CDs corrupt – it’s worth checking to make sure they’re readable! We’re finally backed up and indexed all the files through the end of 2002. Now I just have 2003 to go. Our backup workflow is to weed the files – deleting any we don’t want. Then we back up the files to CDs. Once images on are a CD – we index them with keywords in a program called Extensis Portfolio. The final step is to made DVD backups ever time we have 7 DVDs completed. The CDs stay here at the house – the DVDs go to a separate location. So far – we’ve got over 4000 images indexed – and who knows how many more to go. More than enough to keep us occupied in the cold weather!

Until next month, have fun with your photography.

Patty

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2. Raw Files: Who Needs Them?

By Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence

Maybe you’ve noticed that your digital camera has a setting for shooting files called RAW – or you heard that Photoshop CS can read RAW files – and you’re wondering do you need to use RAW files? The answer is – it depends!

On our three Canon digital cameras – we shoot everything in RAW mode. And when we use our Nikon 775 – one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t have a RAW mode setting. But not everyone needs to use RAW mode if their camera has it, or to go out and get a camera just because it has RAW mode.

What is RAW mode?

Raw files essentially represent the raw or unprocessed (though it may have some lossless file compression) output of the digital sensors used to take the images. If your camera is set to record a JPEG or TIFF file, then when the image is taken, a processor in the camera will convert the raw sensor data to the appropriate format after image processing (e.g. sharpening, applying color correction for white balance, changing contrast, potentially changing the bit depth in the color channels). If you shoot in raw mode, your camera doesn’t do any of this processing, it simply stores the sensor data. These files tend to be larger than fine mode jpeg files (e.g. on our Canon D30, a jpeg file is roughly 1.3MB, and a raw file is roughly 2.8MB), though not as large as uncompressed TIFF files (About 18 MB for a 16-bit file).

Why shoot RAW mode?

There are a number of reasons to use RAW mode. First, as we’ve noted in previous columns, jpeg files have a quality loss due to compression. Usually, this is undetectable if saved once with only mild jpeg compression. But, if you’ve got a great shot and want to really enlarge it, why put up with needless loss of quality in the image?

Second, for those cameras that support greater than 8-bit per channel color bit-depth, the raw mode files retain the full color bit depth. (Warning: TECHNICAL EXPLATION AHEAD – the non-technical explanation is in the next paragraph) Most digital cameras record sensor information in three colors (red, green, blue). For each of these three color channels, they can have some number of discrete levels they can record. An 8-bit per channel bit depth for a file means that the file can have 256 levels (28), 0-255. These files are sometimes also called 24-bit files, for 8 bits in each of 3 channels. Black would be 0 in all 3 channels, white would be 255 in all 3 channels. This combination produces almost 17 million possible colors; why would anyone want any more? The human eye (at least ours…) would not be able to tell an 8-bit per channel file from a 16-bit per channel file (another common format) if the starting point was a well-exposed photo without any editing.

The advantage of the higher bit-depth is that exposure isn’t always perfect all across an image. A big group photo taken outside on a sunny day, for example, will tend to produce dark shadows if you avoid blowing out the highlights. But what if you want to bring out important detail in the shadows (say, Aunt Millie’s face)? Sometimes the color balance is off (you’ll know it when you see it – things that are supposed to be white have an orange or blue cast that affects the entire image). In both of these cases, having the extra information will let you expand specific parts of the color spectrum to fix an undesirable aspect in an exposure. You can do this to some extent with an 8-bit per channel file, but do it too much and you get posterization effects. Our Canon D60 and D30 can record 12-bits per channel of information, but it gets clipped to 8-bits if we use jpeg files. We don’t want to throw away that extra information if we can avoid it.

The final reason that we use raw mode is that we have control over how the image is processed though editing it on our computer – rather than having the camera process it. This way, we can decide about the level of sharpening, and make any necessary adjustments to the white balance. We’ll have an article on white balance in a future issue that will explain how and why you might want to adjust it manually. For now, just trust us that the ability to adjust the white balance is a lifesaver. At one event Patty photographed last year, the flash misfired on the most important shot and everything in the photo was blue (think award winner, dignitaries, award, literally everything was a shade of blue). Since we could set the white balance manually – it only took a couple of seconds to get the colors looking much better. If she hadn’t shot in RAW mode, we might still be trying to adjust them.

Who should use RAW mode?

If you edit your images on your computer, then RAW files give you much more control over the base image to edit, since you get to make decisions about image processing, rather than the camera. If your camera has a RAW mode – give it a try and see the difference it makes in what you can do with the files your camera produces.

If you print your photos straight from your camera, either on your own printer or by taking them to someplace like Ritz Camera or Wal-Mart for printing, then RAW files are most likely more trouble than they are worth. We’re not sure if one-hour printers can handle RAW files, and the files are most likely larger than the JPEGs you’re currently creating. But keep them in mind for the times that you do plan on doing (or having someone else do) some editing of your images.

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3. Basics of Using RAW files

By Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence

So, you’ve decided to give RAW mode a try. Here are a few tips on how to get started with RAW files.

First, before shooting, set the file mode in your camera to RAW. Other than this change, shooting photos is just the same as before. If you have been shooting jpeg files, you will want to check your storage capacity for files; raw files are larger than jpegs, so you won’t get as many photos on your storage card. For the Canon, you will get a set of files ending in “.CRW” denoting a raw file.

When you are done shooting, you will need to download your files to a computer for processing. To our knowledge, no printers will let you print raw files straight from the camera. Sooner or later someone will probably come up with one that does, but we have no idea why anyone would want to do this since the benefit of RAW files is in the editing.

You will need software to convert the raw data to a standard imaging file. This software can be the package that came with your camera (e.g. Canon Zoombrowser) or third party software. When we first started shooting raw mode, we found that we didn’t like Zoombrowser, so we bought a third party package, Breezebrowser (www.breezesys.com). Other software that handles RAW files include C1 DSLR (www.phaseone.com ), and Adobe’s Camera Raw which is available as separate purchase, and is built into Photoshop CS, (www.adobe.com ). All of these work with a number of different cameras’ raw files, and may be worth checking out. We use Breezebrowser, and have been quite happy with it. We have also just recently upgraded to Photoshop CS (review coming one of these days), but have not formally compared file conversion with Breezebrowser. Other packages (e.g. YARC Plus www.pictureflow.com) will covert files for specific cameras or camera lines.

Once you have your conversion software, you simply need to instruct the package how you want to convert the files. For anything we might print, we convert to 16-bit TIFF files. You can also set the white balance and make adjustments to exposure and contrast. You can also set parameters for sharpening, which we almost always set to the minimum amount possible, and sharpen later while editing. Then simply set the program to convert the files, either one-by-one or by batching an entire directory.

That’s all there is to it! When you are done, you have a set of files that can be read by any standard photo editing or printing package. This way, you have a file that takes advantage of the full range of information that the camera can capture.

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