IMAGE CAPTURE for RAW Page 2

RAW Capture and Viewing Options

There are a variety of ways of presenting the results visually. One way is to place the resulting colours on top of the ‘pure’ reference colour with the latter as a superimposed spot. This is a very sensitive test as the eye discriminates clearly between errors. It suffers from a lack of information about just what is wrong with any given colour.

More important is what real images look like! This is always our maxim. We processed some real shots from a recent shoot. Overall we found the working of the control points to be a little jittery with the effects taking a few seconds to catch up, leaving us oscillating back and forth on some occasions. As with other methods setting the white point by clicking on a bride’s dress simply blew the detail away, you have to take far more care than that! The increased amount of readily available meta data from the camera was a useful diagnostic when reviewing images. We set up the image for overall exposure, then placed control points to darken the sky and finally placed a control point over the model’s face to selectively lighten her features. As a starting point it was a good benchmark and it was processed without going near Photoshop. The one thing we could never do with any of the shots from this shoot of Tom Lee’s was neutralise the image by clicking on Jen’s dress, there was too much brightening agent in the material which sent the white balance spiralling out of control! Comparing the values for the dress and the Macbeth White swatch, the dress was consistently 8 Lab points bluer. We overcame this by setting the neutral off theMacbeth Chart (leaving the dress too blue) and then using four colour control points in the dress each of which reduced the saturation in the dress, thus losing the colour. This was quicker than doing the same thing using masks in Photoshop.

LEFT: The top image of this trio shows a pure, electronically generated Macbeth Chart. TOP: In order to overcome the blue white brighteners in the dress we neutralised the image using the Macbeth Chart which left the dress blue. We then applied the control points in Capture NX and reduced the saturation to remove the colour cast.

“U-Point technology is the unique point about Capture NX and is strong enough to justify the purchase of the software”

U-Point technology

This is the unique point about Capture NX and is strong enough to justify the purchase of the software. It solves one of the most common problems – that of over-bright skies against a correctly exposed foreground. Normally this requires the use of a mask to control where the lightening takes place. A reasonable level of skill is required, particularly if the sky dodges behind a tree or other complex shape. UPoint has very clever selection and feathering which makes a really classy job, with the added advantage that the sky is being darkened using RAW data – the purest available and arguably better than processing the file to Photoshop and ‘recovering’ fixed pixel data.

The speed benefits of processing skies in this manner is significant. In the example of the derelict boat shown, we darkened the sky in Capture NX in 2m 16s, using a control point which we then duplicated three times to refine the adjustment area to just the sky. In Photoshop we opened the RAW file and processed it for the background tone, then duplicated the image and closed the original. We then reprocessed the RAW file with a darker sky and shift dragged it onto the duplicate. Then we made a mask to leave only the dark sky showing using the Magic Wand and Quick Mask. This Layer Mask was then blurred slightly to refine the edges. This took 4m 16s but remember that we have performed this exercise in seminars on dozens of occasions. The U-Point technology creates a more refined transition between the sky and the boat. Note that the blue tarpaulin was left overbright. This could be darkened by adding another control point in Capture NX, in a matter of seconds, far quicker than adjusting the Photoshop Mask. For a task such as this then NX wins hands down and does a better job in the short term. While it would have been possible to spend longer on the Photoshop approach, the difficult transition between the sky and the trees is always problematic but was handled with complete ease by NX – this was the really impressive part of the tests we carried out and would justify the cost of NX on its own!

There is the potential option to exploit the power of Capture NX to create a mask for sky replacement rather than colour adjustment. We are grateful to SWPP member Paul Atkins for suggesting this method during a demonstration by American Tony Corbell on his recent SWPP/BPPA, UK tour. Talking over the possibilities during a coffee break we pondered if it would be possible to utilise the U-Point method to drive the sky (for example) to pure white and then use this to create a mask for a sky change. The technique was moderately successful and certainly worth some development – we await feedback from our clever readers!

LEFT: The sky was darkened back using the brightness slider in Capture NX on a Control Point. This Control Point was then duplicated to transfer the darkening to all of the sky. Finally another control point was added to the model’s face so that it could be selectively brightened. For comparitive purposes the dress was left biased blue.

FAR RIGHT: The Macbeth Chart remains useful even with Capture NX; it was used here to bring the background image to neutrality before using selective controls to take the blue from the dress.

images – Tom Lee

RAW Capture and Viewing Options

Aperture

It is difficult to test Aperture in our all-PC environment. Visiting the various web forums is a waste of time, riddled as they are with fights between diametrically opposed parties unwilling to give an inch to their rivals! None of them seems to possess a stop-watch – it’s not rocket science guys, you process 10 images against the clock and move the decimal place one slot to get the time per image!

The summary from our research is that Aperture costs more (£219 against £156) and is slower in all but webpage building. Some claim Lightroom to be twice as fast at processing images. Lightroom also has the ability to dual process, working on images while you get on with other things, Aperture does not apparently do this. The small number of ‘wedding’ users we spoke to seemed to be reluctant to shift from Bridge, using the processing part of the workflow as a step towards refining images in other ways.

Other Software

The iView media pro software kept cropping up during these conversations especially when a quick look at images was needed. In our experience FastStoneImage Viewer is an excellent (and free!) image viewer, which handles RAW files as well as all the usual suspects. The 3.4MB file took a couple of minutes to download, about 20 seconds to install whereupon we were able to view 107 images in13s. Loading individual files for viewing took 2.9s and to process a RAW file at full size took 4.9s. This takes some beating for a piece of free software. The software has contact sheet builders, red-eye removal, sharpening, colour correction, slide-show builders, pdfmakers and a host of other features. It does not obey sidecar metadata and displays ARGB files as sRGB, ie lower saturation but this is about the only flaw we can detect.

RAWShooter has been woven into the Adobe products, Phase 1 seems hell-bent on annoying its user base, with time-based use charges, when all around them are providing free upgrades or freely available software. ACDC remains quite a fast way of examining images. For printing, Qimage remains top of many experienced user’s lists.

Where does this leave us?

Well for starters, if you have Bridge and like it, move no further. Lightroom is good as a standalone if you have no intention of going to Photoshop (Aperture perhaps for the Mac-monkeys). Capture NX is useful for its U Point technology. For simple viewing you should try FastStone before all else as it is free. For colour precision, Bridge and Adobe RAW create the most accurate renditions when used skillfully. For recovering over-exposed shots the cameramaker’s software and noise reduction might give you an edge (it certainly does with Fuji FinePixViewer). The chances are that you will end up with a suite of software which you mix and match, depending on your workflow.

Page1 - Page 2

Photo Quote: It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. . . . The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures. - Vincent Van Gogh