Photo-A-Day #1370
Okay, compare these two photos. Do you know what the major difference between the two photos? Raw. My first shot ever with my Nikon D80 was in Raw and I switched to jpeg format. For some reason today I decided to have the camera shoot JPEG and RAW while I monkeyed around at the house.
I had never even done any post processing with Raw before and had no program set to open a RAW file. But I had the computer pic Adobe PhotoShop Elements 6.0 and it opened right up and there was this whole new set of options I could use to determine how my photo would look. Needless to say I was incredibly impressed. I think that I should be shooting Raw from now on. Why I didn’t before I have no clue.
Now that I am shooting raw I am going to have to get another External Drive. Luckily I know that Robert Scoble is giving away a free SeaGate FreeAgent|Theater HD device at CES tomorrow morning. Here is how you win.
Be one of the first 10 people to meet me at the Seagate meeting room on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1 p.m. PT. Bring a business card or contact info so we know where to ship your prize. You must be a member of Twitter or friendfeed.
And Here is How I win.
Be the one to tell the winner about the contest. “Huh?†Well, if you retweet my Twitter message and the person who shows up tomorrow says that they learned about the contest from you, you win the device too.
So if you are going to CES tomorrow tell Scoble you learned about the contest form me, send me a direct tweet and I’ll get you the vital info Scoble needs to send me my prize. And I am on Twitter and FriendFeed.
Another Contest that I know of that is quite cool is through JoeTech.com. Joe of JoeTech.com is a whiz at fixing Apple products. I had a broken Ipod Shuffle. I sent it to Joe and said that if he could fix it he could offer it up as a prize in a contest. He fixed it in nothing flat and the contest opened today.
How to enter
This is simple, really. All you have to do for an entry is subscribe to BenSpark.com via email or subscribe to JoeTech.com via email. If you’re already subscribed via email you don’t have to do anything. On Wed., January 14, 2009, I will combine my list of email subscribers with those from BenSpark.com and draw a winner randomly. Remember… If you’re subscribed to both blogs, you get two entries.
And one more thought on contests. I am so thrilled with your responses to the contest I started today with TenBills.com. Keep the entries coming there are many T-Shirts to give away!
I’ll RT for you!
You know I must be the only person in North America who has never had an iPod – it’s time isn’t it???
I’m off to subscribe to Joe Tech!
Heather in Beautiful BCs last blog post..When I’m an Old Lady and Live With My Kids!
Thanks Heather,
I’d get an iPod Touch, go for the gusto, but by all means please enter the contest and don’t miss my contest for T-Shirts from TenBills.com. Have a great time in Vegas, your home away from home.
In those two photos, which one is the Raw one? I like the top photo better in terms of the warmer colors.
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Elizabeth,
The top one is the Raw one. The colors warmer and richer. I felt like there was better detail too could just be my eyes.
The top picture is certainly better than the bottom one, the detail is clearer, but do you use more memory by taking shots in RAW?
Karens last blog post..Are we all getting addicted to the Social Networks!
Karen,
RAW does require much more memory than JPEG but with the price of memory cards that should not be a problem.
I just subscribed to Joe Tech. How easy is this to enter! Very cool! I’m gonna tweet this one.
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Baba,
Yep, a very easy one to enter.
Shooting is raw is in many ways much easier. Basically RAW is recording everything the sensor sees. This means you don’t have to worry about setting the white balance at all since white balance is applied by the camera when it creates a JPG. Also raw as you noted is much bigger which is a double edged sword it takes up more room and thus writes slower to your memory card (get a big fast memory card and tnis is generally insignificant).
The RAW files are lossless unlike JPG files which are compress. The JPG compression process actually loses some detail in you pictures. Some people believe that modern editing software can work as well on JPG’s as RAW file but really it is better to have more info to start with before you manipulate.
The real down side it RAW needs to be converted to JPG before you can look at it. \
Nikon View NX will handle Nikon RAW files quite well. Picassa which is free from Google also does a great job.
If you are going to work with RAW and I do recommend it either shoot raw + jpg which will give you the raw file as well as a jog based on your current camera white balance settings. This takes up a lot more space really the best thing to do is to download the codec from Microsoft so you can view RAW files as thumbnails.
http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/codecs.aspx
This will allow you to see the files before you open then so you don’t have to rememner that dsc_3517.DSC is a picture of EVA and DSC_3588.NEF is a picture of a cat you don’t need
Stephen,
You are pretty knowledgeable about this stuff. I’d love to see more of that on your blog. As someone who has written books for public consumption with instruction you can really clean up in the dogs who blog and photog niche.
Drew,
I think that Michael Mistretta’s post “RAW vs JPEG” explains the difference very well.
Of course, it’s not only the memory cards that pose a problem – it’s also hard drive space. Oy.
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Thanks Bryan, when I have a moment I’m going to check that out.