Hi Ian.
Very nicely done, a for argument turned upside down! ;D ;D
As hinted in my first reply, I started as most in jpeg, my first use of raw was when flying over the Grand Canyon, I put my 300D in raw on takeoff and back to jpeg on landing (left it on P)! I put the folder in DPP and processed it, they looked like camera jpegs! :
Since then I got DxO, I started by just using the default settings, much better in most cases, but it was 5he cases where it didn’t work ‘straight out of the box’ that made me fiddle with things, oh my, that created some crap, but reset is your friend! Eventually I found that selecting different presets gave better results than I could manage, but it showed my error,
small changes, make small changes to the sliders! Since I started on DxO 9, it has got more intelligent and there are more automatic selections which intelligently analyse each shot and apply different levels of effect depending on subject, for example finding a face will turn off microcontrast so as not to accentuate skin blemishes!
I have started to revisit that first raw folder and have found that improvements can be found.
Cheers, Graham.
Ian_of_glos said:
This is a very good analogy and just as I end up with a horrible tasteless, gooey mess whenever I try to bake a cake, every time I have tried to process a RAW file the results have been dreadful. After working on a picture for hours I always discard the RAW file and just use the JPEG that the camera produced. It is usually good enough for what I want and way better than anything I can create from the RAW file.
There are many videos on youtube that claim to explain how to process a RAW file to produce realistic images but in reality all they are unhelpful. They usually involve an expert showing everyone how competent he or she is at using Lightroom, flying between different sliders, moving one up another one down without ever explaining why they made each adjustment or how they know how far to adjust each one. The viewer is left baffled and unable to apply any of the techniques to their own photo processing.
I have even read two books on Lightroom and yet as soon as I see that horrible Lightroom screen appear on the computer my mind goes blank and I run for the cover of the JPEG that the camera produced.
The photo editing programs that I have used are all so complex and difficult to use that it is not surprising that, like me, many people have given up and just make do with JPEGs. It has the secondary benefit of saving me half a terabyte of disc space.