Editing RAW images and advantages over JPEG

Editing a RAW file is almost identical to a JPEG in terms of how you do it. The difference being that the RAW file contains more data, which gets lost in a JPEG when it is compressed, particularly if the software in the camera is doing it. So you can get more out of a RAW that might well be lost in JPEGs coming straight from the camera. I use Adobe Lightroom to edit the RAW files, then export them as JPEGs for upload, don't know much about the alternatives I'm afraid but completely understand if someone doesn't want to pay for a subscription to Adobe's software.
I would recommend looking on Youtube for tutorials, not only as there is plenty of stuff available free online but books on software can get out of date pretty fast due to the nature of the beast.

Apologies mods for going off topic here, please feel free to spilt this conversation off.

 

Olympus did provide Raw editing software but it appears to be more limited than I would perhaps like, or I just have not got my head round it properly.

 

I'd suspect the first book (which I have somewhere) is OOP as it's an Ian Allan publication. I've seen it offered for as little as £3.72 secondhand on Amazon.

 

I agree this needs to be split off from LE etc, There are a huge number of videos available on Youtube - Off the top of my head I'd suggest maybe finding ones from American travel photographer Scott Kelby who has a number showing how he processes certain pictures. There's also a Danish landscape photographer Mads Peter Iversen who has a series of e-books on processing (available to purchase but there are what he describes as light versions which I think can be viewed free of charge)
Processing like taking pictures is a personal topic with as many ways of approaching it as there are photographers.

 

I'm a also big advocate of Adobe Lightroom and used RAW extensively for many years starting out with a book that had been recommended to be by a photographer friend, written by Scott Kelby. I still use LR on a standalone Mac and haven't followed the path of online subscription since I bought the software I wanted. LR does much much more than allow RAW editing and the cataloguing of countless files is a godsend for me finding things I'm looking for via keyword searches. I have around 80K images, majority not railways I should add.

In more recent times however I have found that I don't need RAW and for most railway 'record' images thatI take, hi-res Jpeg is sufficient. If you like landscape images with drama in otherwise burnt-out skies or light brought out of shadow then I would conceded to making use of that extra bandwidth that RAW may provide and is otherwise lost when your camera compresses as Jpeg.

 

I'm not really a fan of all the digital tweaking of photos that happens these days. Whenever I see a photo nowadays I always assume that it's been digitally enhanced, and so therefore isn't an accurate depiction of what the scene would have been like in real-life. The photo's colours would have enhanced, the contrast adjusted etc. A photo now is basically that particular photographer's idealised interpretation of that specific moment in time, and not how it would have looked when viewed in real-life.

 

Film images also have to be processed in a lab, just like digital ones are done on the computer. Granted you can do much more on the computer, and you can definitely go overboard on the saturation etc. which I something I personally try to avoid. It's all subjective in any case.

 

Even before a photograph file is opened up for any editing, a camera sensor and lens hardware will have altered the scene from what the eye is seeing (before we even consider any on board camera software).

The ability to zoom from a certain position, depending on focal length used, will compress field of depth and make space between objects appear much less. You also have distortion caused by the curvature of the glass, more apparent with closer objects and again more so depending on the elevation between lens and object.

The sensor itself, some can be better than others at picking up certain colour wavelengths etc. Immediately, a photo may appear more saturated in say the Red spectrum than the blue etc.

That has been the issue of cameras since the dawn of their creation, and isn't something suddenly thrust upon during the photoshop era. If anything, we now have more tools to correct a digital image to fully represent what we saw in the moment. However, as pointed out above, that comes with a few issues. Not everybody's eyesight quality is similar, nor depth perception, nor colour perception. So what looks entirely correct to one person, may not to another.

 

Be careful with that statement as many people have eye problems which affect how they see colour. The obvious example is red/green colour blindness whilst another is an acquaintance who identified any shade of green as grey so it could be that it is your sense of colour that is at fault - and not that of the images you see.

 

Another thing to be mindful of is that a digital or film image is just an interpretation of reality and not all cameras and films are calibrated to show identical exposure, light & colour - just as our eyes are not identical either. Then add screen and printer / paper into the equation and we're not talking the same image unless every step is identically calibrated.

In terms of image 'enhancement', this isn't something from the modern age and as a teenager, I learnt skills in my home dark-room, exposure, dodging, masking etc were all things that could be done with an aim to getting a pleasing image - to my eye anyway. I do see many images that in my view have been 'systematically slaughtered' in photoshop and I would always want an image say of a locomotive in a landscape to not look obvious that it's been 'improved'. But that's me and photography is subjective and we all have ideals on what looks 'good' and 'not-so-good'. I would say that all images viewed in magazines are enhanced and some of these look 'over-cooked' to my eye.

I have a friend who owns top-price Nikon equipment for wildlife photography, gets some very nice images and then in my view, ruins them in a cheap photoshop app by getting colour balance and saturation way off. Each to their own I say.

 

Some photographers spent/spend longer in the darkroom "tweaking" a print than they did composing and taking the original photo. Don't assume that a non digital image hasn't been "tweaked" in some way. Types of developer, developing times, grade of paper, printing techniques - they can all have an effect on the appearance on the final print. Even if you send your negatives to a commercial lab for printing, there's no guarantee that the final print will reproduce faithfully what you took.

 

Agree about tweaking an image is nothing new, push processing to enhance the ISO, dodge and burn, different developers, exposure during printing were all common tweaks in film days, it’s just now we can do it with a few clicks of a mouse rather than floundering around in the dark.

I’m not sure about the value of books and tutorials which I found rather confusing. They all seem to say create layers for virtually every adjustment which I find has no benefit at all, I only need to create a layer on very rare occasions. The important thing is to forget most of what you know about film photography, you are not making a picture you are capturing data. If you insist on jpeg then you are throwing away around 30% of that data. A RAW file is ‘lossless’ but a jpeg will degrade slightly every time you resave it and the only place you can alter the white balance is in the RAW converter. Look at a RAW file as a digital negative, if the data has been recorded it can be brought out in the final image, the skill is doing it in a way that gives a decent overall result. The success in doing that will depend to a certain extent on the equipment and software used. On my Nikon D800 the dynamic range at 100 ISO is 14 stops i.e. I can expose at 7 stops either side of the optimum without loss of data, the dynamic range of colour slide film was very narrow, that’s why you see so many with burnt out highlights. I tend to underexpose digital images to make sure highlights are preserved, it’s easier to lighten up a dark image than darken down a light one.

The other factor is editing skill, I’m no PS expert and I’ve acquired what knowledge I have by experimentation over 14 years of digital photography. For any serious photographer I would recommend subscribing to Adobe PS CC, it costs a tenner a month and that gives you all the updates and email suggestions and ideas for improving images. My normal workflow is to adjust, white balance, exposure and colour rendition in Camera Raw and then open the file in PS to do further adjustments ( I can’t get on with Lightroom at all, it is included in the Adobe CC package). The use of high ISO settings will mean it will be necessary to remove digital noise, how much of a problem this is will depend on the camera, modern high end full frame cameras are unsurprisingly much better than those with cheaper sensors. I don’t find the noise reduction facility in PS to be very good and after experimenting with various plug in software I’ve settled on Topaz that can be purchased as a download. Images will also need to be sharpened as the last operation in processing, it’s not really sharpening in the true sense, just increasing the contrast slightly at the point where the tones change to give a crisper separation. As with everything else don’t overdo it or you will end up with some odd halo effects in the image. I normally do this using the misnamed Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen if it’s a low contrast image.

Photoshop is impressive software and whatever adjustments you do there are normally half a dozen different ways of doing it but remember it’s better to do a number of small adjustments rather than whack sliders all over the place you will soon find ways of giving you the results you want. To illustrate what can be achieved I attach two images from a trip to the S&C a couple of years ago. On my way back from a rain soaked Blea Moor I slipped on some loose stones and fell into a stream partly submerging the camera. Water must have got into the electronics and unknown to me the camera decided to change the white balance to the preset fluorescent light setting and underexpose by about five stops. The first picture is taken from the unedited RAW file, the second is what I ended up with, not a masterpiece but useable. If the original had been a jpeg I wouldn't have been able to do a lot with it. It says a lot for the Nikon that after drying out on a radiator it’s worked perfectly ever since!

I hope some of this is helpful.

 

Snap! Last year I slipped and tumbled down an embankment and into a stream along with my Canon 5D Mk4 which was completely submerged.
You were luckier than me, after a week of drying out, the camera wouldn't function at all.....the electrics were shot at!
I managed to get some money from my household contents insurance and got myself a Canon EOS R full frame mirrorless which I'm very pleased with.

 

The one thing I *really* hate with a passion is HDR - when it's wound up to 11 as some people like to do it just looks so unnatural.

 

I'm pleased I didn't have to make a claim as I had a big one a few years back when all my gear was nicked in Portugal along my wife's phone, two iPads and a case full of clothing. It cost the insurance company £7,500.

 

OK I suppose if you want it to look like an oil painting but it's not for me

 

Wow, that's a pretty amazing save! It always amazes me how much detail you can pull out of the shadows on digital. But if you burn out the sky and other highlights then they're gone, I also underexpose most images to make sure I don't lose them.
I'll have to investigate that noise reduction software you mentioned, I'm not satisfied with the results on high ISO images I get out of Lightroom so been meaning to look into alternatives for a while.

 

I'd recommend Topaz too, I got the whole suite of DeNoise Sharpen and Gigapixel at a tremendously good price on a Black Friday deal a few years ago, an outright purchase which came with a year of free upgrade support.
However part way through the year they introduced Photo AI which encompasses all three functions with a single interface. After that my updates for the three original products stopped and all development seemed to be on Photo AI, not sure what the current situation is but Topaz did seem to be pushing Photo AI. Having bought the suite I had a free copy of that but not having bought it separately my licence to use it expired at the end of the year support. In fact I didn't find it as much use as the original products of which DeNoise sees the most use , feeling the software took too much control away.

I think it's possible to download a free trial version.

This was taken on a Canon 5dMk2 back in 2010 pushing the camera some way beyond the design capability - processed Lightroom the noise is still very evident.



The same image reprocessed from RAW using Topaz DeNoise after Photoshop, still far from ideal.



And again with Topaz Photo AI, one of the few images I found it useful for. And to answer the point raised by @bleeder4 this oddly is much closer to what I recall seeing that evening than any previous processing produced. The human eye has a greater dynamic range than camera sensors, but it is indeed all subjective.

 

I'm a great believer in shooting RAW, but I shoot the best quality JPEGs at the same time. And yes, if in doubt slightly underexpose.

The many advantages of RAW have been mentioned already, and for me they also provide a larger image. That helped/helps when my designer was working on my owl book/is working on my SR steam loco memoirs, by reducing the number of times the pink text box appeared on some pages in the first draft returned of each new section - 'Have you got a larger version please Bryan'!

I am happy to continue using Photoshop Elements, which I update regularly - I am fairly hopeless with software and PSE is probably at my limit. I do little more than try and correct images to what I saw when taking the photo - something vital with an owl subject, and something I work hard to do as I edit my steam loco photos - with a few exceptions which will be admitted and explained in the captions. I do use layers from time to time.

I recently got Topaz the A1 which I have found can help with reducing grain and even enlarging an image, but only by using with great care. I almost always have to turn down the suggested level of grain removal, sometimes by a great deal. And it quite often fails to help with my 1960s SR steam B & W photos - it often adds a vast amount of 'grain' instead of removing it. The PSE RAW editing page frequently does a better, and an almost instantaneous job with those very old and often poor quality images.

But trying to get the best out of Topaz and PSE combined does mean my draft SR steam loco memoirs will include every 1960s SR steam loco photo I took, albeit with some limited to around 1/8th page size on an A4 size page.

Indeed the very worst are probably about 1/12th page size. Which is about the size of the smallest two on the attached draft, 3/4 A4 size image that be in Chapter 1 of my memoirs. More work to do with contrast and black level, but I'll hold back on doing that until I see how it comes out when I get a proof of the first couple of chapters printed. The attached is a very, very low res version. The 'master' is an incredible 240 MB at 6000 x 7800 pixels as a result of all the work I have had to do so far. I will certainly experiment with seeing what size I can get the master down to and still get an ok print result. This approach with several photos forming one image is how I have decided to use photos that are well short of being able to be included on their own - there will only be a few such inclusions in the book

31739 is the D1 4-4-0 ( I have 2 much better photos of it to include at half page size), and the double header is T9 30117 heading E1 31019. All photos taken with a Brownie 127 in 1961.

Oh dear, I've now strayed from RAW, hopefully this post will be ok here.

 

There is an argument that was put to me when I started out that ETTR (Expose-to-the-right) provides an advantage whether RAW or JPEG. The reason is that increasing the exposure has the effect of also increasing & exposing any noise that hasn't been removed. If the image is a tad over-exposed in the first instance, decreasing the exposure can also reduce visible noise. This said, cameras and software have come on over the years whereby better, 'cleaner' images are possible in lower light and higher ISO settings than in the past.