Sony tells DSLR shooters they're idiots

On 12/2/12 12:36 AM, in article
, "David J. Littleboy"
wrote:


BobF wrote:

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. AWB can't possibly work.
In principle. It can't tell the difference between a pink shirt in white
light and a white shirt in pink light. (More generally, it can't know what
the subject/scene was supposed to look like, so it can't infer what the
light source was. Are the walls off white or Wedgewood blue? Both will
confuse any AWB system.)

You're a bit behind the times...

And YOU are a little ahead. You clock is off...

In article , Gary Eickmeier
wrote:

But if you shoot RAW only, the camera each time you broese through an
image has to do a RAW to JPEG conversion = additional power
consumption.

no it doesn't. it uses the embedded jpeg.

In any case, you can easily see whether you have blown out the highlights,
exposed too low for a healthy image, or got the WB or focus screwed up.

no. you can get a rough idea but that doesn't mean that much

you can fix quite a bit in raw, particularly white balance, which isn't
even set until you process the raw, long after you took the shot.

With
my Live View I can see most of this before exposure, in the LCD or in the
viewfinder.

many times live view is not an option.

"tony cooper" wrote in message
...

No, Alan, he doesn't have to do that at all. That's the method - or
workflow - that you and I prefer, but there's no reason at all that we
should impose that requirement on anyone else.

Whether or not his system is flawed depends entirely on what type of
photographs he's taking and what the end-use will be. The average
photographer taking family-type photographs - and that's what the
majority of photographers do - makes 4x6 prints of very few images and
views the rest on a television or computer screen. Very few of those
image could be improved enough to matter working from RAW.

If Gary was here requesting help in improving his workflow or his
images, there'd be a reason to encourage him to learn to use RAW. If
he was here saying that his images worsened with enlargement, there'd
be a reason. But, he's not.

Gary's wrong in his coattail trailing posts about RAW being extra
work. If he's happy with his .jpg results, he should STF up and do
what works for him.

This idea that what we individually do - whether it's workflow, choice
of OS, employment of a particular software, or use of accessory
devices - is what others should use is both ridiculous and arrogant.

Let's wait until someone asks "How can I..." before we start telling
them how they should.

What a nice man.

But I don't need to be told that I can do what I wish, and the only reason
for starting this whole argument was that I said I haven't seen much benefit
from doing RAW - visible benefit. I have tried it, seen the clumsy controls,
and wondered why go through that if my JPGs were already terrific.

I print 13 x 19 sometimes on both Epson and Canon printers (8 ink) and the
results are incredible.

I will keep trying, comparing, looking, but I am fully capable of doing my
workflow the way I see fit and extracting the most from my camera etc etc. I
appreciate all the tech savvy, but I come from a realm where audible or
visible are the standards, not tech measurement.

Gary

Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.12.01 17:12 , Alfred Molon wrote:

At 1 or 2 minutes per RAW conversion, if you process 200 RAW images,
it's 3-6 hours of work to process 200 images. It's a tedious time,
because you are in front of a computer screen playing around with the
sliders, wondering how much you should increase or decrease this or
that parameter.

Assume that 10% of images are worth some work in the editor (potential
keepers), then only 20 will need to be processed in ACR. Often that's
about 30 seconds to adjust 2 or 3 paramaters. Often that one setting
can be applied to several, many or most - if not all of the images in
the set.

No time at all.

Without any raw processing at all I can still review all of the 200
images (I use Bridge, others use Lightroom, Aperture, etc.) without
needing any raw conversion at all.

All this painful work, and in 60-90% of cases you end up with an
image which is not better than the camera JPEG (this percentage of
course depends on the scene - there are scenes with difficult
lighting conditions, where less camera JPEGs will be usable).

It's funny how you bring up terms like "painful" which may apply to
you but don't seem to apply to most people discussing this here.

As to workflow, simplification is always better - so shoot one format
only and save card space.

I can definitely see a reason to go RAW for portrait photogs who will be
making 20 x 24 canvas wall images, but for wedding especially I would rather
not. The last one I shot 750 images. Most were fantastic, some were low
light and might have benefited from RAW but I would rather get the exposures
right in the first place than rely on fixing it in post.

Gary Eickmeier

Alan Browne wrote:
On 2012.12.01 20:12 , Gary Eickmeier wrote:

Sorry. How is this? There is a neat fix for this problem with Outlook
Express, and I found it, but don't always use the correct icon to
open the program. So last time, I simply converted it to rich test
so I could bold my response to show the difference.


Whatever, it seems correct above. Outlook has a poor history where
usenet is concerned (MS refuse to follow comment and signature
conventions). There are several compliant newsreaders - Thunderbird
being one of them (and free).

And have you noticed the gobbledegook symbols you sometimes get with various
readers that place symbols where some punctuations are supposed to be? I
googled up a fix for that one, too, but havd long since forgotten what it
was. As time and progress move on, some strange glitches are left behind.

Gary Eickmeier

In article , Gary Eickmeier
wrote:

But I don't need to be told that I can do what I wish, and the only reason
for starting this whole argument was that I said I haven't seen much benefit
from doing RAW - visible benefit.

that's because aren't doing it properly.

I have tried it, seen the clumsy controls,

what clumsy controls? they're the *same* controls as with jpeg, and
more effective too since it's working with raw data.

you said you use lightroom. that's anything but clumsy.

and wondered why go through that if my JPGs were already terrific.

I print 13 x 19 sometimes on both Epson and Canon printers (8 ink) and the
results are incredible.

they could be even better.

I will keep trying, comparing, looking, but I am fully capable of doing my
workflow the way I see fit and extracting the most from my camera etc etc. I
appreciate all the tech savvy, but I come from a realm where audible or
visible are the standards, not tech measurement.

if you can't see the difference then no need, but others definitely can.

"nospam" wrote in message
...


if you can't see the difference then no need, but others definitely can.

That is always the argument from the subjectivists, "if you aren't as
perceptive as we, then do what you want" but when subjected to blind testing
they can't prove any of it. But they are very good at getting the neurotic
to spend thousands more than they need to for benefits that only others can
see.

Emperor's New Clothes.

Gary Eickmeier

"David J. Littleboy" writes:

BobF wrote:

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. AWB can't possibly work.
In principle. It can't tell the difference between a pink shirt in white
light and a white shirt in pink light. (More generally, it can't know what
the subject/scene was supposed to look like, so it can't infer what the
light source was. Are the walls off white or Wedgewood blue? Both will
confuse any AWB system.)

You're a bit behind the times... my new Nikon has a data base of
thousands of
photos which it uses to judge the exposure and colour... and it works quite
well, thank you. For example, it can detect a face and judge the colour's of
surrounding objects as well, looking for colour castes. Note that all
humans are
about the same tint, mostly differing by saturation and brightness values.
(Except for certain African's of course!)


Your friends don't include Asians and drunks.

Dunno about AWB, but I find the database-based AE a complete
disaster. With my old center-weighted cameras, I could look at the
scene, realize it was going to be wrong, and compensate. Database
based may be good enough for snapshots, but for landscape sorts of
things, it really doesn't know what you think is going to be important
and gets things wrong randomly. Change the composition slightly, and
it sees a different pattern and changes the exposure. Count me as not
impressed.

Yeah, "matrix metering" is my biggest disappointment in camera tech. It
sounded good, but I find I'm going back to manual more and more, even
for apparently stable situations, because I find exactly what you
describe -- slight compositional changes can cause rather startling
exposure changes unexpectedly. (That's why exposure compensation on top
of automation isn't the answer).

I still carry the camera in matrix and program mode since that's the
fastest setting to get me to a record shot in an unexpected situation;
but after those first few shots I switch to manual.

Most-wanted function to assign to a direct button on my cameras: Figure
out the current shutter speed and aperture in program / matrix mode, and
set mode to manual with that shutter speed and that aperture set. This
gets me a slavagable picture instantly (well, nearly always; I'm pretty
good at restoration work, so I can rescue most things if I really need
to) AND sets up the camera to improve the exposure from there, without
my having to remember the settings and manually change mode and manually
duplicate the settings I remember.
--
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Alfred Molon writes:

My experience is that with some cameras, if you set them up properly,
you end up using 60-90% of the JPEGs.

One can. Especially in-studio where you have complete control of the
lighting, there no problem working from the jpegs.

Working in fast-moving situations in the field it gets very different,
though. If I turn around to shoot what's behind me, the lighting often
changes *drastically*. And a couple of seconds can often be enough to
completely miss the shot, so *speed* is of the essence.

In the past I would start processing all RAWs, then when comparing them
to the camera JPEGs would notice that the converted RAWs in many cases
were not better than the JPEGs, despite all effort put into converting
the RAWs, optimising them, choosing the best possible combination of
parameters etc.

I strongly suspect your post-processing standards are low.

At 1 or 2 minutes per RAW conversion, if you process 200 RAW images,
it's 3-6 hours of work to process 200 images. It's a tedious time,
because you are in front of a computer screen playing around with the
sliders, wondering how much you should increase or decrease this or that
parameter.

At a coupple of seconds to set a few parameters for a batch of raw
images, I can do the 200 images selected from the 1400 shot well enough
to use as a slideshow that night in half an hour. I might spend another
hour the next day improving cropping on more of the second-level images
before posting the official gallery.

All this painful work, and in 60-90% of cases you end up with an image
which is not better than the camera JPEG (this percentage of course
depends on the scene - there are scenes with difficult lighting
conditions, where less camera JPEGs will be usable).

These images are massively better than the camera jpegs.
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Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
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In article , david-
lid says...

On 01/12/2012 22:14, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Sat, 1 Dec 2012 10:23:56 -0500, "Gary Eickmeier"
[]
Can someone out there who has such an illustrative example of the VISIBLE
superiority of RAW please post a link?

You might be interested in
http://www.slrlounge.com/raw-vs-jpeg...e-visual-guide

Interesting, in that in all but a couple of examples the JPEG looks better!

The trouble with such comparisons is that they're really comparing two
JPEGs with different degrees of processing. The "zeroed JPEG" has been
processed in-camera, the "zeroed RAW" has been processed in Lightroom.
What's actually being compared is not "RAW vs JPEG" but the camera's
default processing vs Lightroom's default processing. Clearly the
camera's defaults are more aesthetically pleasing in many cases than are
Lightroom's.

This is reasonable since it is pointless to pays the bucks for an Adobe
product just to take the in-camera defaults.