silverspectrum said:
Hi Alreality & all, thanks for your advise and I go try and play around. I hear that RAW is easier for post processing.
One question, like for night shots which may have more noise, am I correct to say that it is better to shoot in raw so that I can process the noise better ?
For capture one, does it support the Nikon raw format ? I am using a CP5700.
Hi Bro...you can get noise in RAW mode too leh heheh IT is almost no hard or easy way to get the noise out even for RAW. It depends on how bad the noise really is......Hate to burst your bubble but RAW is not the begining and the end all for the ultimate in saving a picture data from lens to your memory card heh...
It can contain more information but that is not to say it can keep alot more then jpeg as per say...at least not in the way you might be lead to believe. Meaning if you screw up your shot with extreme exposure..nothing in the world will save it. That goes for out of focus and bad photo composition too. heheh..
And talking about JPEG...the real problem with jpeg is not so much the compression ratio the camera will use when it capture the picture each time you shoot. It is how many generation you keep saving that jpeg file that is crucial. Let me give you an example. Have you ever recorded your own music cassette tapes. If you record your song to tape 1 and then use tape 1 to record it to tape 2 and then use tape 2 and record it to tape 3 and so on and so on. Each time you use a previous tape to record to a new one...the quality drops dramatically. As this is analoq recording..so all the noise and pops that are inherent in the tape is passed on to the next one as well..along with the music.
Now the same concept applies to JPEG in a way. JPEG is a compression format. Meaning, it takes a picture and compresses the pixel information into as small as you would want it to when you save the file. The less compression the bigger the file and more accurate it is and the pixel layout is not compromise too much. But the higher you choose to save on size by dictating a smaller file size with a high compression rate the more the pciture will lose it's colour definition and image quality. As the jpeg compression program is not a human being, the way it trys to save the image by removing or averaging similar information between same colour or shape pixel informations are not that good as the compression ratio increases. That could means a more blurry image, distorted pixel alignment to each other, all the sharpness and edges will get distorted as compression increases. Now that is already bad enough the first time you SAVE it...now you take that same file and OPEN it again...again..the JPEG engine will uncompress it and show it to you on your PC screen..and you SAVE it again...the jpeg engine will compress it again ...but this time it compress the picture file again (reworking the compression process again)along with imperfection generated from the first save version...so now it is compressing mistakes or artifacts from the first save version too. SO each time you open it and re-save it...it gets worst! That is really the biggest problem with jpeg. For me when I finish downloading a set of what I shot to PC, I alway record and save this as my first generation without opening them first on my PC. Then I will pick the best shots I like and then will open them and then save them as TIFF or PSD which are format that does not compress the picture file but of course it is bigger but it is now more like a digital file...pixel for pixel. That is the one I will use for all my general purposes if I was going to do anything beyond just printing a copy of it.
Also note. Never do your graphic manipulation in jpeg mode if you intending to do a lot of saving in between saves!!!. You are doing just that...saving up a lot of imperfection with each time you do something and then saving it as a jpeg and reopening it later to work on it time and again. Each time you do that..you are really adding more imperfection to it. If you want to do it...do it all at once with the file still open. You can periodically save it by clicking save but make sure you dont close the picture file and then reopening it and do something else to it and then re-save again. If you are not sure what I mean...better re-read what I said earlier above. hehe. AS I mentioned if you want to do a lot of reworking on the picture...best to convert it to tiff or psd to do your work. Once you are finish...save that as your master copy and then make a jpeg one for distribution.
That to me is the only really reason if you want to consider RAW an advantage over JPEG. RAW is just a proprietary data format but at the heart of it...it is really a TIFF or what you can call an uncompressed format.
