By Carl Farley for Guy Thibodau . . .
The presentation on the RAW format, although excellent from a technical standpoint, was a great overkill and actually presented a lot of misinformation on its value for the average digital camera user. About the only time it would be useful to me would be when I made such a gross error in exposure that I found it necessary to recover an image which even when recovered would be extremely poor at best. I’ve had little trouble getting an image which pleases me using any of a number of image enhancement programs which correct color balance, brightness, contrast, levels and hue/saturation, etc. The other problem with the raw format is that the file size is greater than 10 megapixels, more than ten times as much as a good high resolution JPEG image.
The best part of the presentation was alerting the user about the value of a gray card for exposure and color temperature (balance) corrections.
Going back to basics, what most people desire is an image of something they wished to view, keep, or share with someone else. The limiting factor on image quality is the resolution of the lens used by the camera. You could have a terepixel chip to save the image, but who cares if it was a very high quality lousy image.
As many have discussed, the camera image never represents the actual colors (shades and hues) represented by the existing lighting conditions. I can’t remember an image I’ve taken at any of the many JPEG formats that I couldn’t make more pleasing to me by some form of image manipulation. My current cameras, a medium priced Kodak camera suitable for all but the advanced amateurs or professionals, have 7.1 megapixel and an 8.2 megapixel Olympus Prosumer camera with an excellent lens. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”.
Likewise, although the eye is a remarkable photographic instrument, unless you are a hawkeye, there is no way you can distinguish more than perhaps 20 shades and I’m not too sure how many colors and hues you can distinguish. A RAW image is useful for nit picking magazine editors who probably airbrushed the image or did some other artistic enhancement.
If you enhance an image with Picasa2 it only saves the algorithm instructions to enhance the image. The original image is always retained so it is also lossless. The basic problem with Picasa2 is that it does lousy color corrections and can’t clone burn or dodge parts of the image.
The newest version of Irfanview 4.0 is also a freebee. It also does a lot of image enhancements and corrections and file manipulations. Another good program to enhance small images is Genuine Fractals. It can convert a smaller image (megapixels) to a much larger image (megapixels). It does this by some algorithm which interpolates the data between the pixels in the smaller image and expands it to a larger image. The cheap version limits the file you can work on. The full version allows working with larger files.
Perhaps, the best way to judge your camera’s capability is to go to dpreview.com and see if it is on the list which has been evaluated. Usually there are many pictures taken under different situations, lens resolution charts and almost every possible type of data an advanced amateur or professional would want.
