More JPEG vs. Raw

OK. Here's another example. Another against the light situation, and another exposure aiming at not burning out the sky. I'm looking at the old border bridge of Burghausen over the Salzach river with my Nikon D70s and the 1.8/50D lens. It was quite a nice scene with the old buildings, the church and a few spots of the castle up above for me. The first picture is the JPEG that I extracted from the D70s raw file so it is exactly what the camera would have made out of the picture.



And this is my own interpretation of the scene from the raw file. I don't know... do I really need to comment that? It looks artificial, I know, almost HDR-like. The odd thing is that we're so used to the way cameras behave that we rate a photo that shows what was there for the human eye to see as artificial. Funny. Anyway, I absolutely LOVE this shot - and without raw, there would've been no chance to just get it that way.



PS: yes, in the upper middle area, that is sensor dust, darnit!!! I should've dodged it before publishing, I know.

Woes of printouts

A couple of days ago I started to have a set of 5 photos printed by more or less "professional" services. #1 was the photo shop with its own developping monster machine here, #2 was the Kodak instant photo printer in the drugstore supermarket here, #3 was Cewe, one of "the" mass developpers in Germany.

What can I say - none of the three pictures was alike, that was to be expected. Some observations:

The local photo shop applied some (IMHO, extra stupid) "automatic enhancements" to my photos that completely ruined some pictures: colors were altered, and extra-strong highlights in portraits were reduced to be more "normal" or something, the exposure was corrected to spots in the picture that I didn't expose for, making everything too dark. They were the most expensive ones, too. Good paper (Kodak), and good glossy finish, though. I should talk to them and ask them to turn all their automatic enhancements off when they print my pictures.

The pictures from Cewe were all just plain horrible. Muddy, washed out. Lacking sharpness. All colors were much too warm. Good paper (Fujifilm) and good glossy finish, too, but they were the cheapest - and it shows. Never again!

The pictures from the Kodak self-service instant printer were a surprise. Sharp, good colors, no tomfoolery with automatic enhancements (as far as I can tell, that is). The finish is a bit weak though, of course, and its impossible to get anything bigger than 20x25cm out of it.

I have to test more. Problem is that a great many of online photo services are actually all using the same developping service - Cewe. I have to find out which and then avoid them! The other problem is that ordering photos online is a pain in the brain because it takes so damn long to upload the pictures. :-}

UPDATE: part of the problem with the prints was that I edited my photos on a non-calibrated display. I added the "calibration" label to this post as a warning. :-)

JPEG vs. Raw example

In my previous "Shoot Raw!" post I promised to add some examples why shooting raw is a good idea. Here is one.



First, why did I take that photo? Well, these trees were simply looking awesome against the light on that early summer day (and I knew its quite impossible to capture such a scene propperly with my camera). Now, I don't know if I'm a lousy photographer that the JPEG outcome is so poor, but I tried to keep clipped areas as low as possible to preserve the blue sky, as it was essential to the beauty of the scene (this first image shows the JPEG that the camera produced out of the scene).



Actually, it was just a snapshot at that moment, and I wasn't very optimistic that I could restore this scene's beauty on the computer. But look at the second picture. I decreased the highlights to get some "headroom" for exposure compensation (to bring up that shadows), decreased the shadows, removed the color noise that my camera produces in dark areas, and increased the saturation. Of course I made a couple of different attempts. All in all, it took me 10, maybe 15 minutes to get to this result - which is one of my favorites now (the other versions were a bit washed out in the shadow details because I overdid the noise reduction first).

I hope that this result underlines my request to shoot raw if its possible. You can always run the pictures thru a batch converter with standard settings (or extract the fullsize JPEG preview from the NEF file like I did for this comparison) to save time, but maybe there's just one image amongst a days photos thats worth the extra effort... :-)

PS: I often see people write "RAW" in capital letters - IMHO thats not correct, because its not an abbreviation (like JPEG or NEF). Its just the word raw, and "shooting raw" is the geek terminology a/k/a short version of "you're storing the raw sensor data of your camera instead of letting the "onboard" processor of the camera convert the picture into a JPEG right away".

The widescreen alternative - or is it?

Thinking about buying a new monitor? Be careful. When you go shopping for electronics, the sales assistent will tell you that you now have the choice: for example, buy a regular 19" flatscreen (if you still get them, that is), or buy the 19" widescreen... erm... alternative. I say "erm" because I think it is not really an alternative. At least not at the same diagonal size.

Why? Think about the aspect ratio. "Regular" displays have a 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio, widescreen displays have a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio. The problem is that the sizes are given with the diagonal for both aspect ratios. But widescreen displays are not only more "wide" (sic!). They have a larger horizontal size, but this ALSO means that they have a smaller vertical size.

When you compare regular displays with widescreen displays you'll find that...

• 19" wide is about as high as 15" regular
  
• 20" wide is about as high as 17" regular
• 22" wide is about as high as 19" regular
• 24" wide is about as high as 20" regular
• 26" wide is about as high as 21" regular

What does that mean? First, when you buy a 19" widescreen display, you're buying a display that is about as high as a 15" regular display. First question, since the year is 2007 - would you buy a 15" display today? Well, I wouldn't.

But there's more - a 19" widescreen display usually has a vertical resolution of 1050 pixels. That means, compared to the regular 15" it has the same vertical size, but it has a much higher vertical resolution (15" regular: 768 pixels). So, more pixels are squeezed into the same height, and in the end that means that fonts and GUI elements will be even smaller than on a 15" display. Thats certainly something I wouldn't want... in the end you'll perhaps increase the font size to 120%, and you partially lose what you gained from the wider display.

Think about laptops as well - some vendors sell laptops with 14.1" widescreen displays. I think they have the same height than a regular 11" display. WHAT? The fonts and GUI elements are really small on these. And then there's the 12.1" subnotebooks... widescreen of course...

The question is why widescreen displays are being pushed into the market like that. Is is really only because of HDTV and things? Most likely not. Is it about the benefits of the wider display for the human viewing angle (after all, our eyes are arranged next to each other horizontally)? That would be nice, but it ain't that, either. Guess what - its about money, of course: at the same diagonal size, there's less waste (and thus more profit) when the common sizes are cut out of the larger mother glass, thats all... 15% less waste means 15% more profit. Bye, bye, 4:3 and 5:4...

So, if you're buying a widescreen display, make the right choice: get a really big one of you want to improve things on your desktop.