Monday, May 31, 2010

Working on Raw Colour

Original JPEG from CameraVia PicasaVia Raw Therapee 

Whilst I haven’t blogged about RAW format lately. Its not that I haven’t been taking lots of RAW photos. Its more that I haven’t a really  found productive way to handle processing my RAW photos. I have a pentax camera and their default RAW format is PEF version of RAW is currently ignored by picasa at the upload phase. Thats ok I can read the card a second time in the Pentax Browser. However that inevitably involves a lot of tweaking and slider adjustments for each photo individually. Then I discovered if I copied these PEF files into a folder that picasa is monitoring the file is visualized, with a set of automatic “adjustments”, just what those adjustments are and how to turn them off is a mystery. The good news is picasa doesn’t modify the file at all. I Have noticed that in lower light the jpeg from the Camera and the Picasa interpreted RAW version are often quiet different. If the image showed promise I’d usually end up fiddling in the Pentax Browser and end up with something different again. When using RAW I usually focus most on getting realistic colours from the images greater colourspace depth.

I’d heard good things about RAW Therapee but only got around to downloading it today.There is a lot of good stuff to discuss. more for later posts, but what I immediately loved was its default process, such as white balance and brightness and that are easily modified and customized profiles easily stored. You see a preview and can still adjust it further is required. If you like the preview you can save it as a JPEG, TIFF & PNG File. If you use picasa you’ll have the original jpeg, the picasa version and the RAW therapee version all side by side (like above) so you can compare and export the version you want.

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