Probably well known and obvious to those who read the manual but I was surprised to find that shooting in B&W mode makes no difference really with the image when capturing Raw. When capturing JPG I used it to eek out a little more performance in low light conditions, ie our house night and day. So I was a little more than surprised when I opened the images in UFRaw and they were color–compounding my surprise was the fact that the thumbnails were black and white. However, it was a pleasing discovery because I found that most of the images worked better in color than in black and white, though ones I wanted to convert were easy to do with Gimp (I’m sure UFRaw has an option, my non-maual reading self just hasn’t found it yet).
Below are two shots that are both equally nice in color or in grayscale
This last image is a perfect example of what I would have missed had I actually captured this in black and white. It is so much more vibrant and exciting in color, partly because of all the noise that ISO 1600 introduces, and it just wouldn’t be the same shot in grayscale.
If anything this was a happy discovery but I really need to sit down and read my Magic Lantern guide.
So here’s my first spin with shooting RAW during lunch in downtown Hartford. Not my finest work but I am stunned by the difference between shooting JPG and RAW in terms of image quality. There is no comparison. JPG looks so noisy now and RAW is buttery smooth.
I grabbed this one behind the main drag in West Hartford Center. I played with duplicating layers in Gimp and then boosting color ranges with the hope of making the white pop a bit more from the brick.
The challenge, as I see it now, is workflow. I typically shoot between 100-200 pictures in a give “camera day” and processing that many from RAW to JPG (doing color correction and cropping) is going to be difficult and time consuming. What it likely means is that I am going to have to get very selective about what I “keep” and what gets “tossed”.
My current system is pretty much keep everything unless it is a complete disaster of a shot, ie shots with my thumb over the lens. With the work involved with RAW I’ll likely make more use of scanning thumbnails, cherry picking my favorites, working them over, importing to F-Spot, and exporting to Flickr. Any way that I look at it RAW will definitely mean more work in terms of preparing to publish but it feels worth it considering the flexibility and quality it offers.
