If you enjoy photography, don't make the mistake I did.
Using my then-new SLR in 2005 and 2006, I photographed everything from my new son to otherworldly canyons we visited in Utah. The only problem: the photos were taken only in JPEG format.
JPEG is fine as far as it goes, and indeed for most folks it will suffice. But having rediscovered my enjoyment of photography in the digital era, I wish I'd used the raw image format that comes with SLRs and higher-end compact cameras.
This illustration shows the checkerboard Bayer pattern of a typical digital camera's image sensor. Each pixel captures either red, green, or blue.
(Credit: DxO Labs)My initial regret was from the realization that raw photos, although taking up about three times the storage space as a JPEG and requiring manual processing, offer higher quality and more flexibility. But what I've come to understand since then is a second advantage of raw: because processing software improves over time, raw photos in effect can get better with age.
For that reason, I've begun recommending friends who show some enthusiasm for photography that they should think about shooting important events in raw format alongside JPEG. You don't have to mess with the raw files today, but if it's an important event like a wedding, you might want them for later.
I've included below some samples of a noisy image shot in near-darkness at ISO 25,600 from my SLR. They may not convince you that shooting raw is a miracle cure for photo quality, but they do illustrate some differences with the camera's JPEG and that the raw-processing software isn't standing still.
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Canon's new S90 high-end compact camera.
(Credit: CNET)Adobe Systems released beta software on Wednesday to support raw images from Canon's higher-end new compact cameras, the Powershot S90 and G11, Olympus' rival E-P2, Panasonic's FZ38, and a host of SLRs.
The software updates are betas of Lightroom 2.6, the Camera Raw 5.6 plug-in for Photoshop CS4, and the DNG Converter 5.6. All the software uses the same raw-image processing engine.
Raw images provide more flexibility and image quality but require more processing; typically only higher-end cameras support raw file formats. Most folks are happy with JPEG, but many photography enthusiasts prefer raw.
It's a hassle, though: Adobe and various competitors spend a lot of energy reverse-engineering each new camera's format before software such as Lightroom, Aperture, or Picasa can open and edit the photos.
Raw images are the norm for SLRs. The new beta software supports raw images from Canon's higher-end EOS 7D, and Nikon's new professional-grade D3s, the Pentax K-x, and Sony's A500, A550, and A850. Also on the list are medium-format models from Mamiya and Leaf. For a full list, check the blog post announcement from Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty.
The new software also corrects an error in Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5 that could mar images from some Sony, Olympus, and Panasonic and from various medium format digital camera backs. The glitch only affected people with PowerPC-based Macs.
Update 8:02 p.m. PST: As Michael Reichman observed on the Luminous Landscape site, Canon's S90 is a member of a newer breed of camera that corrects lens distortion on its own, making parallel lines parallel again. Naturally, I was curious if Adobe's raw processing techniques did the same, because the distortion can be pretty severe, and fixing that manually is impossible in Lightroom and a hassle in Photoshop.
So I asked Adobe. The answer: yes.
"The S90 raw support in the release candidates (Camera Raw 5.6 and Lightroom 2.6) provides distortion correction that allows our raw processing results to match the optical characteristics of the JPEG output and what's viewed on the camera LCD," Hogarty said.
Adobe Systems released the first Lightroom 3.0 beta only last week, but already people are adapting the software for their own ends. In Sean McCormack's case, time-lapse video.
Time-lapse photography, for those unfamiliar with it, compresses a sequence of still images into a movie that appears to speed up the passage of time. It's how nature documentaries get those clouds scudding over the mountains and the sun racing across the sky.
Most of us use just a small fraction of what our software can do, but McCormack is one of those people at the other end of the spectrum who figures out how to push software well beyond the built-in feature set. In Lightroom's case he took advantage of its ability to export a sequence of shots as a video, a feature designed to let photographers create easily shared slideshows.
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The Lightroom 3 beta will look familiar to current users, but there are changes under the hood. In addition, Lightroom catalogs can be synchronized with Flickr.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)With the release of its first beta version of Photoshop Lightroom 3.0 on Wednesday night, Adobe Systems is trying to improve the heart of the photographic editing and cataloging software.
"With Lightroom 3, we're looking at a performance and image quality rearchitecture," said Product Manager Tom Hogarty. Those two goals are in opposition, since better image quality demands more computing horsepower. But Hogarty said the software is more responsive when moving among photos, and images look better with new noise reduction and sharpening abilities.
There are other changes, too, though: a revamped import process for importing photos into the software catalog; built-in connections to upload photos to online services and keep them in sync; a more flexible mechanism for laying out photos to be printed; new abilities for stamping watermarks onto photos; and the ability to export photos and music as a video file.
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Panasonic's GF1
(Credit: Panasonic)Adobe Systems on Monday released Lightroom 2.5 and the Camera Raw 5.5 Photoshop plug-in, software updates that add support for two high-profile Nikon SLRs, Olympus' ambitious but expensive E-P1 compact camera, and in a minor surprise, the Panasonic's GF1 competitor to the E-P1.
As expected from the beta test, the new version adds support for the Nikon's high-end D300s and entry-level D3000. Also on the list is Panasonic's ultrazoom, the DMC-FZ35.
The downloads are available at Adobe's Web site.
Dealing with the raw formats from higher-end cameras gives photographers more flexibility and quality than JPEG, but it's a hassle for companies such as Adobe and Apple that must figure out the proprietary formats. Adobe doesn't yet support yet newer cameras such as Canon's higher-end 7D.
The updates also fix a problem that could afflict some cameras in the "demosaicing" step of converting raw images into more useful formats. "Camera Raw 5.5 also includes a correction to the demosaic algorithms in the raw conversion process for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response," Adobe said in a statement.
In an earlier statement about the green issue, Adobe said it was relatively minor: "Sony, Panasonic, and Olympus are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files."
A blog post by Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty said the Lightroom update fixes an issue with the image-import dialog box on Windows. He also pointed out this sorry consequence of the complexities of global branding with the Panasonic FZ35:
"Note that in Europe and Japan this model is marketed as the DMC-FZ38. Unfortunately, due to a metadata difference between these cameras, files from the DMC-FZ38 will not be supported until the next Camera Raw and Lightroom updates," Hogarty said.
The new Nikon D300s is getting some raw-image support from Adobe.
(Credit: Nikon USA)Adobe Systems has released a test version of its Camera Raw 5.5 plug-in so Photoshop can handle raw images from the Olympus E-P1 high-end compact camera, Nikon's new D3000 entry-level SLR, mid-range D300s SLR, and Panasonic's DMC-FZ35 ultrazoom.
Raw images are made of data taken directly from cameras' image sensors without in-camera processing, and they offer more flexibility and higher quality to those willing to put up with the hassle of converting them to JPEG or other more universal formats with software such as Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom, Apple's Aperture and iPhoto, or Google's Picasa. But first, that software must be updated to support each new camera, since raw formats are proprietary and differ for each model.
Adobe released the new Camera Raw plug-in release candidate at its Adobe Labs site. Although there's no corresponding version of Lightroom, software engineered specifically for handling raw images, Adobe also issued a release candidate for its DNG converter 5.5 that can transform raw files from the Olympus, Nikon, and Panasonic cameras into Adobe's more digestible Digital Negative format.
The new software also corrects a problem experienced with "demosaic algorithms in the raw conversion process for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response," the company said. Demosaicing is a central step in raw conversion. In it each pixel records only data for only a single color of red, green, or blue, is interpreted so each pixel has values for all three colors. The checkerboard pattern of colors is called the Bayer pattern.
Update 10:30 a.m. PDT August 20:: I asked Adobe about what cameras are affected by the green issue in the demosaic algorithm, and Tom Hogarty, Adobe's Lightroom product manager, had this response:
"Sony, Panasonic, and Olympus are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files."
Some might be disconcerted to find that older raw images might look different when they're opened again with software that uses an updated algorithm. For those folks, I recommend exporting a JPEG or TIF to bake in your editing settings for raw images.
For the rest of us, this illustrates one of the advantages of shooting raw: new algorithms can make photos you took earlier look better than when you first took them.
Adobe also made a related change with the addition of profiles to its raw processing software; these can make photos more closely resemble results from camera settings such as portrait, landscape, or neutral, and I use them by default these days. Improvements to noise reduction algorithms is another area that springs to mind where new algorithms could take advantage of faster PC hardware to produce better photos.
Having the camera make these processing decisions when it creates a JPEG is convenient and fine for the vast majority of people, but for photo enthusiasts, raw shooting benefits from steadily improving software and hardware.
Adobe Systems, taking the same course with its forthcoming Creative Suite applications, will offer the next Mac OS X version of Photoshop Lightroom only on Intel-based machines.
Apple has chosen to discontinue support for Macs using PowerPC processors beginning with its next operating system, version 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is due to arrive in coming weeks. Adobe said last week that its next Creative Suite will follow suit. The CS family includes programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DreamWeaver, and Flash Professional.
Lightroom, which is for editing and cataloging photos, isn't part of the suite, but it's headed the same route.
"The next full version update of Lightroom will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers," Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post last week. "Lightroom 2 updates will continue to support PowerPC."
Meanwhile, Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack, while fond of PowerPC, took a pragmatic tone on his blog: "By the time the next version of the (Creative) Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either."
Earlier this month, I encountered an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom analysis by consultant Lloyd Chambers that expressed surprise with a facet of the image editing and cataloging software: it didn't export photos as fast as possible.
Chambers found that if a photographer wants to produce JPEG or TIF images from the originals in the program, the fastest way is to divide the batch into thirds and export each third separately. Using a modern Mac Pro system, exporting a test set of photos took 351 seconds as one batch and 189 seconds divided into three batches running at the same time.
"The big disappointment is the sluggish performance importing and exporting files, which are tasks that are key to efficient workflow--tasks one has to do over and over. Most of the 'juice' of a Mac Pro goes untapped," Chambers concluded. "You have to load it up with more than one job to force more of the available CPU cores to be used. Lightroom should do this automatically!"
The study caught the attention of others, including Scott Kelby, head of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. I was intrigued, too, because although many programming chores are difficult to spread across multiple processor cores, exporting photos is trivially easy since it breaks conveniently into independent bite-sized pieces. So I thought I'd see what Adobe had to say for itself.
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Nikon's D3X is now supported by Adobe Lightroom.
(Credit: Nikon)LAS VEGAS--Adobe Systems has released the final version of Lightroom 2.3, its photo-editing and cataloging software, along with its close relative, the Camera Raw 5.3 plug-in to let Photoshop CS4 edit raw images from higher-end cameras.
The new software (available as a download for Windows and Mac OS X) supports Nikon's top-end D3X, an $8,000, 24.5-megapixel machine whose owners likely will usually prefer raw files for their flexibility and quality advantages over JPEG. Also supported is Olympus' new midrange E-30.
The Lightroom 2.3 update also fixed a number of bugs and adds support for eight new languages: Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, and simplified and traditional Chinese. Adobe made the announcement Monday just as the Photo Marketing Show (PMA) was getting under way here.
The Camera Raw software works with Adobe's flagship CS4 version of Photoshop, but also with the consumer-oriented Photoshop Elements 7, Premiere Elements 7 for video editing, and Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac OS X.
Nikon D3X
(Credit: Nikon USA)Adobe Systems on Friday issued near-final release candidate versions of Lightroom 2.3 and the Camera Raw 5.3 Photoshop plug-in, software that can support Nikon's new top-end, $8,000, 24.5-megapixel D3X camera and Olympus' mid-range, $1,299, 12.3-megapixel E-30.
According to the release notes, the new Lightroom version also fixes a few bugs: a memory leak that could crash the software while people were making local editing adjustments to photos, a processing error handling smaller sRAW photos from the Canon 5D Mark II, a slideshow glitch, and problems uploading and burning files to discs.
Lightroom is designed for editing, labeling, and cataloging photos--in particular, the flexible but non-standard raw files from higher-end cameras. Adobe Camera Raw is used to handle raw files in the more general-purpose Photoshop software, letting people convert them into JPEG, TIF, or other more portable formats.
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