I write this article to share my personal experience with other digital photographers and wannabes out there who’re currently using point and shoot digicams and aspire to shoot with digital SLRs (DSLR). This article is timely in the sense that it coincides with the advent of the Canon 300d dubbed the digital EOS Rebel which will revolutionize the digital SLR market and allow for most common folks with a small budget to be able to enter the digital SLR realm.
Those of you who shoot with point and shoot digicams usually shoot with JPG format and do little post processing after the image capture. Those JPGs are usually very sharp and require little processing. With DSLRs, the images are little different, they look ‘soft’ out of camera, especially those shot in raw mode. Most major camera manufacturers do leave the images almost unprocessed or with very little processing and let the user do the tweaking /enhancement to their taste. Raw images contain much more information (data) than their JPG counterpart therefore allow for ample flexibility in image processing.
So how one goes about processing that vast amount of data found in the raw images?
Image importing:
For serious photographs and best results, I shoot in raw mode. 6-megapixel Raw images allow me to print up to poster size 16x20 without much visible grain.
The raw images can be imported into your computer using a USB card reader, or directly from the camera via an USB cable. I use a $10.00 PCMCIA compactflash card adapter and use Windows explorer to read the pics bypassing all software, even the one provided by the camera manufacturer.
Once read into a folder on my hard drive, I use BreezeBrowser to 1) browse through the images for a first quick assessment and 2) once I see a picture deemed good enough to warrant processing, I convert it into TIFF format (other raw conversions software are Adobe Raw Image Plug-in , Capture One …)
Before processing, TIFF format
Image processing:
I use Adobe Photoshop strictly for image processing. You can have many other choices here (Digital Imagepro, Photo Impact, ..) but I’ll talk about my experience with PS7.
First, I open the TIFF file and zoom in to 100% to make sure my adjustments are accurate to the pixel.
I start out by doing all the miscellaneous adjustments necessary before getting into the meat of the picture like rotating the image to get the horizon line really horizontal (use the ruler tool, draw a line that would align the horizon line from left to right, then rotate arbitrary to rotate the image , then crop the extra parts ); cropping the extraneous portions of the image you don’t want for better composition (use the crop tool); the other patching you’ll have to do quite a bit is getting rid of the dust on the image: for this I use the band aid tool, alt-click on the portion of the image next to the area to be fixed, then past it over it to completely mask it out.
With those annoyances out of the way, I then use the image adjustment->variations to select the best image recommended by the software; 99% of the time I’ll choose the current pick image; once in a blue moon, for special effects I’ll choose a different variation.
Then I apply auto levels to balance out the lighting levels on the image; if not satisfied with the result, I may undo it and/or do manual levels and move the cursor to the level I’m happy with.
I don’t normally use auto colors since the colors chosen are usually not to my taste; instead I use curves and slowly move the middle anchor points 1 point at a time from the bottom to the top to adjust the color channels on the image. Make sure you don’t overdo the curves here since they tend to insert noises.
Then to add contrast to the image, I either use auto contrast to have this done; If the result is not to my liking, I’ll do local contrast by this technique: Filter->sharpen->unsharp mask by giving 20 to amount, 50 to radius, 0 to threshold; these parameters should be good enough for most pictures. Try to give it a different variation to your liking.
Last when I’m happy with the tone/contrast/saturation of the image, I’ll apply Unsharp mask (USM) to sharpen the image. Use filter -> sharpen->unsharp mask and give it an amount of 100 to 250, a radius of .5 to 2, and a threshold of 0. I typically use an amount of 100 for portraits, 200 for landscape as to not oversharpen the image . You may want to try different parameters to your taste.
Finally, when I’m all happy with the final look of the picture, I save it as a JPG with maximum quality as to keep the file size small and also preserve the original TIFF file.
Post processed, JPG framed:
deevee,
Other references:
A more complete and involved workflow