Shooting RAW

Having owned my Nikon D70 for one year (just reached 15,000 photos) I just realised I haven't even used the RAW shooting mode. The main reason being was I was happy with the results from the camera and only tinkered with photos slightly. This week I decided to shoot in RAW as I have more time to fiddle with each photo as it's holiday time.

What this means is each photo I take is now 4-5MB instead of 2 and each photo will need to be post processed in another program. This is very time consuming. The other problem is now choice. I can import my photos using Photoshop, Bibble, DxO or Nikon Capture. (Mac users can also use Aperture) The problem here lies is each program processes the images differently. While I praised DxO earlier about it enhancing my photos with RAW files it actually destroys a lot of the detail in them.

The best program (I haven't tested Nikon Capture yet) is Photoshop CS2. You have the most control over the image and can create a jpeg without processing the image at all if wanted. DxO no matter what I tried always tried to remove some noise resulting in lost detail. But unless you view the image at 100% you don't notice too much.

Below is an huge image I created to show the difference each program puts on an image. All setting can be tweaked and again I preferred Photoshop's settings and ease of use. I also liked the colour cast PS created.

What ended up happening with me was I imported each image into all 3 programs to see what the end result is. The shitty part is each program gave good results on different images.

DxO always removed detail from images but for macro photos or when you didn't care about the tiny background textures DxO made really punchy images. DxO was the only one without any really good zoom function so you never really saw what effect your sharpening had on the image until you processed it. (LAME) If I had to choose what program I'd go with Photoshop but I liked having all 3 to test.

Bibble always proceed very flat but authentic photos. You could then tweak the curves if you wanted something more punchy. But this would be best if the photo you shot was already great and needed little tweaking. Bibble also got a few more extra pixels from my photos? I got photos 3028x2002 above the normal 3008x2000. I'm not sure why Bibble was the only program to grad those extra pixels from my photo.

PS CS2 was the easiest for me to use but didn't always produce the image I liked.

PS doesn't have lens distortion but you can get free plugins. DxO does and I think Bibble has a plugin for this.

I haven't done any tripod tests with JPEG to RAW shooting modes but I can definetly notice the amount of control you have on a RAW image. I'm still trying to figure out if it's worth all the time and effort. If I had to shoot something for a work project or large print I'd definitely go RAW but for most of my photos I'm thinking JPEG is the way to go. Or i'll be up to 4am every night tweaking EV values and sharpening photos.

What sucks was that there was no clear winner for the programs. Luckily I own iView which made quick work of RAW thumbnails. I'll test Nikon Capture (i accidently downloaded the update not the app) and see how that fares.