Re: Hmm.. ist DS competition?

[Herb Chong]

i too have found that the default conversion in Photoshop CS based on what 
the camera delivers can lose an entire stop worth of highlights. put it 
another way, the JPEG that looks completely burned out can be pulled back, 
if shot in RAW instead, to reveal lots of highlight detail. all this is 
assuming proper exposure for the mid-tones. one can reach into the shadows 
too with the Shadow/Highlight tool and pull out much more than can appear in 
a JPEG version of the same scene. on top of this, with the proper tools or 
some patience with layer masks, one can blend multiple exposures spaced at 
one stop intervals to go 4 or 5 stops either way from correct mid-tone 
exposures. this is an example where there is more than 14 stops of dynamic 
range recorded http://users.bestweb.net/~hchong/Random/DSCN1201.jpg. it's 
the result of blending 6 exposures. i took this series with a Nikon Coolpix 
5000, a camera that has virtually no highlight headroom even in RAW.

Herb...
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <pentax-discuss@pdml.net>
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: Hmm.. ist DS competition?


The big limitation in shooting jpegs is that you don't have the exposure 
control that you get when converting RAW in PSCS. There is no comparison 
between jpeg and RAW. It's like night and day. Here's a shot I did 
yesterday to test the 28/3.5 for another member. It includes snow in 
bright sun and heavy shadow under a bench. You'll find detail in the snow 
and plenty of information in the sahdow. It was shot in RAW, and processed 
in PSCS. A bit of additional adjustment was done with the Shadow/Highlight 
tool in PS after conversion. There isn't a slide film in the world that 
can give you that much latitude, and I would guess that you'd have to scan 
a negative film and post-process to get a comparable result. But that's my 
opinion. Others may differ. Here's the shot, which is quite ugly by the 
way :-).