I'm curious what format folks shoot in? I've been playing around in Jpeg, RAW, and Tiff. Frankly I'm not messing around in photoshop or anything but I would like to be able to make a decent print if I capture that rare image of something cool. What do folks here do? I have more options on my D700 than I know what to do with and my laptop is rapidly filling up!
Thanks,
Jake
Hi Jake.
I suggest you shoot everything in RAW format. You may want to consider investing in Adobe Lightroom 2 or post processing. it is very easy to use for image enhancement and file organization.
Cheers!
What other programs are recommend for viewing/editing RAW files? Thanks!
For viewing RAW files, as well as showing photos informally to others, I use BreezeBrowser Pro - I use it for the RAW files still on the card (I delete at least half before downloading). I have discovered that BBPro is used by lots of pros because it is amazingly fast - even with BIG files - and if you shoot RAW+JPG, it can show you one thumbnail per image (so you can delete both versions at once - a big advantage when you shoot as many really bad images as I do! ).
Finally, two other nice features of BBPro are its ability to quickly drag and drop thumbnails to create a quick slide show, and its ability to (almost as quickly!) create a nice-looking HTML gallery. I suggest buying BBPro in the package with DownloaderPro, which is a very robust downloader that allows almost unlimited renaming of files as they're downloaded. The two programs are about $89 combined - you can buy/download them here. Well worth it IMHO! (No affiliation BTW - just a satisfied customer.)
I just finished shooting some tarpon in a cloud of silversides and reflected that without RAW I was wasting my time because the conditions changed so rapidly my camera settings were RUBBISH!
I always use RAW. Even the best pictures need a little adjusting from the camera due to it being set mostly for land use.
I can't see the advantage of shooting only jpeg unless you are the world's best photographer, and never need to make global adjustments (laughably rare in underwater photography), and you shoot so many images that post-processing is impossible.
The corollary is that you need to buy and learn a RAW converter/image processing package. This is equivalent to shooting negative film and learning darkroom skills.
jpeg loses data: is that what you want?
Tim
Another vote for RAW; then Adobe Lightroom. Its a cracking program for photographers.
Another vote for RAW; then Adobe Lightroom. Its a cracking program for photographers.
And another - I think Lightroom is a fantasatic piece of software, and works best when working with RAW shots
Lee
I'm a rookie who just started shooting last year. On the advice of the good folks here, I've been shooting ONLY in RAW. Combined with the use of Lightroom it's amazing what can be done, that I can't seem to do as effectively with JPEG's.
I've just started using RAW. Despite the slow write speed on my compact I've decided it delivers so much more flexibility when it comes to processing.
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