Centurion

LOL at Piloti.

I think that picture was the last shot your camera will ever take.

merklebob

raw is the way to go. however photo shop is not the best place for converting raw to tiff or jpg. bibble labs has a better product that will reduce the work flow time and also include a noise reduction featchure[ noise nigina]

UUronL

RAW is better in most cases, but you're certainly talking about a completely different level of involvement. Many many people won't spend the time learning what to do after they take the digital photos, let alone how to work in RAW.

Most digital camera tests will note how the JPEG quality is. The JPEG or TIFF modes on a digital camera make use of an in-camera RAW conversion. While this can be good - often more than good enough, it makes it harder to make radical adjustments in post processing. Minor tweaks are still pretty easy to do.


Things like the sharpening that is applied, tone curve, colorspace, white balance, hue correction, etc... are all carried as metadata in a RAW file - so the actual photosite datapoints (what the RAW information really is) is separate and distinct from these settings. This means that you can, in an undestructive manner, change all of these settings after the fact, and leave the RAW information unaltered. In contrast, if I shoot a JPEG with aggressive sharpening applied, that is "baked into" the image, which limits how I can resize the image. Certain manipulations can make ugly sharpening halos appear or make minor ones more visible.

Also, the interpolation - the conversion of the Bayer mosaic pattern of red-green-blue to a full color image can be done with a variety of conversion algorithms with varying complexity. These algorithms and applications improve over time. For example, each new iteration of Adobe Camera RAW improves upon the last version, so you can re-process old RAW files and they'll actually look better - benefitting from the advances in RAW converter technology.


It's not easy to work in RAW, and it generally takes an extra tool or step. It is very powerful though. New workflow tools like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture tackle digital photography from a different viewpoint. Photoshop was mainly designed for graphic designers, not photographers, and these new tools are supposed to be revelations for RAW workflow and digital imaging in general. I'm looking forward to trying Lightroom once there is a beta available for the PC platform. Currently both apps are only available for OS X.

BMW#7

Depending on your budget/needs, I would suggest Nikon:
D2X
D200
D70s

with SB800 speedlight.

I have the D70, SB800, & several lenses.
Of course there are many samples in my gallery.

m630

great write up, thanx for takin the time...One point though, since you are so into digi-photography, why dont you use a MAC??? Aperature is supposed to be great, im an avid Apple user and currently play with Photoshop,n im gonna get a new Mac with the intel core once the desktops start appearing...PC platforms are :thumbsdown: for anything creative

UUronL

Aperture, by even Mac reviewers has been pretty badly received - not the concept mind you, simply the execution. It's basically a pre-1.0 product. Some would debate me on that, but it's not quite there yet. It should get better. Fortunately, they should have until the end of the year before we see Lightroom - Adobe's shot at the same problem.

Adobe was simultaneously working on Lightroom, and it should be as good or better. Reviewers who have used both give the nod to Lightroom. If you have a G3/4/5 (POWER CPU), you can download a free beta of Lightroom from Adobe.


I've used Macs at work for various things - we were one of the first customers to purchase OS X Server licenses back in 1999. I own a NeXT computer, which runs NeXTSTEP, which was used as the underpinnings of OS X. I liked the OS and thought it was truly revolutionary... back in the late 80s. Seriously though, OS X is a testament to Jobs' prescience and validates his original vision at NeXT. He was basically able to slap a mildly updated skin onto it and it still passed as revolutionary just 5 years ago.

I've run Darwin on X86 PCs, and have even played with OS X on a Dell. Macs are interesting, but I'm too much of a gearhead to work within the hardware constraints. I have some hope now that Intel is in the picture - their soon-to-be-released Conroe desktop chips are mopping the floor with the best AMD can offer. When the new Intel core technology is released we should get some pretty serious Apple products. Problem is, putting POWER-architecture binaries through Rosetta is actually a lot slower than running them on a POWER CPU natively. Until more software is coded in Universal Binary format, you really take a huge performance hit if you want to run OS X. Photoshop is one glaring example of an app that is much slower on the new hardware since it has to go through Rosetta. Luckily, it is now possible to load XP on the new IntelMacs.

I'd use one for a laptop, but I think we need a year or two to allow the process of converting/re-coding apps into Universal Binary format to move along a bit.

ImolaRedM

Lightroom is nice and Aperture shows promise. I think Adobe was smart to open Lightroom up as a free Beta. I'm moving more away from Photoshop and using more of Lightroom in my work. But it still has a way to go. Many features are still being added. But I don't think I'll make the transition to Aperture and by the time v2 is out it may be too late.

m630

..i've also been a long time Mac head, my current tower is a G3 body with a G4 chipset, and upgraded internal drives, i have a SCSI drive (seagate barracuda 7200RPM) and an ATA drive, and my soundcard was more $$ than some current PC laptops ..i've used mine mainly for music production and mixing from my former life work, now its just for fun...i actually dont run OS X on it anymore, i have it dual boot and use 9.2 as most of my mixing and sequencing software is not OS X native....i havent had any time with Aperature yet but I think the concept is good as well.... I too will wait at least one generation of the intel chips to make it in the the G6 or whatever they call the next Gen Mac...i too have read about the speed issues with non Universals so I'll be looking and waiting for more migrations to take place as well...

UUronL

Heh, as I was reading your response I was thinking you'd say you were dual booting Linux... hehehe. I had an old Lombard that I was dual booting OS X and PPC Linux on - the Redhat-like distro.

Yeah, now Apple has two sets of users that they may never successfully address 100%. The pre-X users are really going to feel it soon when the support dries up along with the hardware that you can load pre-X operating system on.

It can't be a G6 - the G naming convention was based on the IBM POWER/POWER PC (PPC) chip designation. IBM currently has a POWER 6 and POWER 7 under development.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

is based on...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER


The performance of the new Intel core technology is previewed here:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2713

m630

yeah, things are changin for Mac, but im sure it will work out best before long, im old school but as long as they run faster with the same stability, im all for it......intel just needs to stay ahead of the curve as AMD seems to be gaining market share.... you should check out macworld.com, they've explained how the hack works and how it can be done as well, they do it on a mini and are able to boot & run OS X as well as XP....