Friday, May 11, 2007

FRIDAY

West Boylston, Massachusetts - May 11, 2007

My post a little over a month ago on April 5th, and then the next day, April 6th, were addressing Frame and When -- well, here is "when" again. Spring is late in these parts, and while the past week has been extremely warm, it has been extremely dry. A little rain spattered on my lens when I shot this image about 45 minutes ago, but I was playing with a borrowed Rebel XTi and processing the RAW image in Lightroom.

I'm not friendly with either......yet. Outside of using Canon's RAW converter -- much better than it use to be --Lightroom (LR) is the only converter that I currently own that can handle the CR2 files from the XTi. I'm probably going to update my copy of Capture One LE when I upgrade my Canons. LR is probably going to be a big favorite for those folks who shoot weddings and such where they come in after a day's work with 2000+ images. But for people like myself, who might have 10-20 images at a time to work with, programs like Capture One LE, or the now defunk RAW Shooter (RS) Premium (Adobe bought them....ggrrrrrrr), are/were much more attuned to the casual shooter. Yes, there are times when I'm on the road and will shoot several hundred frames in a day, but I never felt I was overwhelmed with processing the RAW images at night in the motel room. I would upload the card/s to my laptop, back them up on the portable HD, look at them in RAW Shooter or C-1, process out a few, tune them up in PS, save, and then JPEG a few for the blog or web. The process was never more than an hour unless I got long-winded with the writing.

I guess part of the problem is that when you get comfortable with a system, you just hate to have it yanked away from you requiring a whole new steep learning curve. It is especially frustrating when there is no visible improvement or time savings brought on by the new system.

There! I've said it! LR is not the "miracle" as promised so far as I'm concerned. In fact, some parts are a royal pain. Yes, I have been known to fuss at programs and my computer skills, but I'm older and better at this stuff now, know a bit more about what I'm doing, and where I want it all to go. It's taking me 3-4 times longer to process files in LR as it did in RS. AND I absolutely hate the sliders -- they are way to sensitive. Sliders are OK, but with LR, a little movement of the slider makes a gross change. I like the "recovery" tool, but I had "fill" with RS. I could go on.

BTW, I didn't have to pay for my registered copy of LR, Adobe gave it to me because I was a registered user of RS. Sweet of them. I would have preferred to keep RS.

But as I said earlier, I will probably up-grade C-1, and use it. I pretty much like that program for RAW conversion, in many ways it was like RS. I once did a test using every RAW converter I could get my hands on -- Lightroom beta, RS-Prem, C-1, Bibble, ARC in CS2, SilkyPix -- and I would rank them: 1) RS-Prem; 2) C-1; 3) LRbeta; 4) ARC -CS2; 5) Bibble; and 6) SilkyPix. I choose a really difficult, underexposed, poorly incandescent lighted, very fair skinned baby held by a very olive skinned Indian woman....shot at 1600 ISO. The Bibble and SilkyPix didn't handle the noise well at all. RS and C-1 did well minimizing the noise.

Yes, I will miss my RAW Shooter.....sigh.

2 comments:

Steve Williams said...

I feel for you Frank. You turned me on to Raw Shooter Basic and I use it almost exclusively when working on the PC. It is simple and straightfoward --- at least for the small volume of work I do digitally, mostly for my blog.

That's about to change due to a reorganization at work. I am going to be returning to my roots as a photographer for a large portion of my work. Shooting a few pictures here and there for a blog is one thing, processing the six assignments and hundreds of images I shot last week is something else. And I am working on a MAC.

I have to grow up now and learn to manage the RAW workflow at a commercial level. So far I have been using the Camera Raw convertor in Photoshop CS2 and will probably move to CS3 and Lightroom soon.

It's good to have to learn something new on the job!

I enjoy looking at your daily image posts. As always they inspire me to get up off my backside...

Steve Williams
Scooter in the Sticks

pitchertaker said...

Steve:

Forgive me for being the source of your motivation. As to my bitchin' -- is was just something I had to get off my chest. Probably brought on my playing with the XTi, there are dangers when playing with new toys. Maybe I should go for a scooter ride and clear my mind -- no wait, that would require breathing pollens which are thick in the air now. Well at least I have adapted to the newer technologies, and will obviously have to continue to do so. Or quit photographing. NOT!

Pitchertaker

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