I’ve been taking a lot of photographs in the last few weeks, many more than I usually do at this time of year but perhaps this has to do with the late autumn and, even in Derbyshire, some rather beguiling light. And I’ve been using all my DSLR equipment. Aside from two film cameras that I use much less often than digital equipment (and ignoring compact digital cameras) I have DSLRs with lens mounts of Canon EF (5D Mk II), Nikon F ( FujiFilm S5 Pro) and Pentax K ( Samsung GX10).
Like most keen photographers, and particularly when I do paid work, I like to save the shots in RAW plus a jpeg. Now that storage media is so cheap, the jpeg is usually large in size and may be used as the final image. Although I think that sometimes the DPP software from Canon does a better job I use Lightroom to develop the RAW files. It’s too confusing to use more than one RAW converter.
Ignoring the fact that some lenses produce a slightly warm or slightly cool colour temperature compared to natural light, with film the choice of the emulsion and its characteristics is very important as that together with any filters used or specific types of processing will determine the final image. Most of us used to choose one film type for scene types and stick to it. For example a more saturated colour film for landscapes was often a good idea. For sports if black and white the most effective would be a high key contrasty emulsion. For portraits in colour a film producing more neutral tones would be attractive and for portraits in black and white a slow very fine grain film with mild contrast would be many people’s choice although David Bailey made wonderful use of punchy high-contrast stock. And depending on choice of film, if it were kept properly, used within temperature ranges and developed with a consistent developer for a particular film then no matter what camera was used, with the same scene, the same lens and the same exposure the results would be completely consistent.
A digital camera’s sensor just collects light in its pixels. The light does not have a colour but the sensor has (usually) a colour filter array that determines which colour is collected in that pixel. But each pixel must have three colours to determine the colour that will be used by the software so the other two colours of each pixel are estimated by reference to the colours of the adjacent pixels. The camera’s software thus creates its own estimate of the image as raw data. This raw data is then processed by reference to the parameters set in the menu options (either the default parameters or the ones selected by the photographer) to produce the jpeg image and those parameters are stored with the RAW file but not used in it.
When the RAW file is displayed in the Raw converter there will be a partially “developed” image because the converter knows how to display each particular camera’s basic transforms. With most manufacturers’ the partially developed RAW images are lacking in brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness and the base light colour (the “white balance”) may be incorrect. It may also be necessary to do something about digital noise, darken or lighten the tones and improve clarity. Some of this work will need to be done to every file and some will be enhancement of the image. RAW converters will permit adjustments that can also be done with other software later. What is excellent about RAW converters is that they mostly do not alter the original file but store the user’s changes in a “developer” file so that it will always be possible to go back and re-develop the image from scratch. I prefer to do almost all necessary work in the RAW converter leaving only serious image manipulation for the photo editor.
It is easy to see that the RAW converter, together possibly with other image manipulation software, can produce the results of almost any film type and this gives digital photography its tremendous flexibility. But it is necessary to be not only very fluent with the use of the RAW converter and learn to use very small adjustments but also to realise that the starting point for different cameras and different sensors is not the same. It is not going to be easy if one has several cameras and shoots RAW with all of them easily to obtain the same results. At least I do find it difficult easily to reach my goal with several different types of RAW files. So after five years of using digital cameras I’ve decided to limit the number of cameras that I will customarily shoot RAW with. And in my next entry I’m going to say which and why.
