I have been doing a bit of work on the first image in my story to see if I can lessen the light and dark area of the image to get a better balanced result, as Rich has said if I took the original in raw I would have been able to work with more information in the image.
But what I have done is open the jpeg in Adobe Camera Raw and played with the image, I think I have made the picture more balanced but would appreciate your opinions.
Original
Worked on in Camera Raw
Steve if this was shot in RAW let me have the file and I will show you what can be achieved. If you don't know how give me a call and we will find a way
ReplyDeleteThis was shot in jpeg as discussed that's why I only have limited control
ReplyDeleteYou can't just open a JPEG in a raw editor! That's like a chef asking for ingredients and you supplying a cooked ready-meal.
ReplyDeleteAdobe Camera Raw - It's not just for Raw files any more
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lonestardigital.com/adobe_camera_raw.htm
Obviously it’s better to be using raw images but I think I can help save the odd doggy picture, I am using 8.1
It doesn't matter that the software *opens* JPEGs. It can still only make your images cruder than they were before you started because it can't make up information that's simply not there.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing particularly special or magic about raw software beyond being able to understand the raw formats, and being able to work with that much data in an efficient way. You can open JPEGs in most raw packages, there's just not usually a lot of point.
Once you've got it open a lot of the tools work the same as bog standard ones in more traditional software. e.g. say you have a Levels tool in a raw processing package. It does exactly the same thing as a Levels tool in, say, photoshop. It can just work with more accurate numbers.
At the end of the day it's just maths. Think of a JPEG as using just whole numbers where as a raw file has decimal places.
So if the real image has (say) brighness values of 0.8, 2.3, 3.5 then a JPEG representation would have to be 1, 2, 4.
So to a JPEG, if you multiply numbers by 10 (say to brighten the image), you end up with massive tonal gaps: 10, 20, 40.
Whereas when the raw numbers are multiplied, those decimal places come through to give detail that was lost before in the whole-number version: 8, 23, 35.
So whereas the gaps between tones should be (23-8) =15 and (35-23) = 12, the transform on the crude jpeg has resulted in tonal gaps of 10 (much too little) and 20 (much too much).
So resulting image is now much cruder. It may still be visually nicer - but I'm talking about quality/fidelity at the technical level.
Sorry for being such a pedant/geek ;-)
But are we looked for a technically nicer picture or a nicer picture?
ReplyDeleteIt’s like how a lot of lens are review as they genraly do lots of 100% zooms and look criticize sharpness, but in the real world you don’t look at images like this and you are not generally blowing them up to poster sizes so it does not matter, I agree that in some cases it’s better to have a shaper picture but what I am talking about is improving what you have, you would not say that someone with a compact camera should not take picture because it’s not as technically as good as an SLR.
ReplyDeleteI agree, use whatever you have to make things look nice to you, and of course you've got to work with what you've got. No problem with that. Was just trying to explain that using a raw tool on a jpeg is no better than using a 'normal' tool on a jpeg. It's no worse, either(!), but we were (previously) discussing raw images.
ReplyDeleteputting raw or cooked aside!..
I like the brightened non-sky bits in your 2nd image. The sky now looks heavily sylised, like a artistic/posterize/painting filter has been applied, so this now looks less clipped and more a deliberate choice. Over all it makes for a more striking image.