Paddy

This is a follow-up to the excavator blip a couple of days ago, showing a couple of paddy fields ready for planting.

I have been fiddling around with Photoshop CS5 and not really getting what I want out of my images. I have gone to extreme and time consuming editing and have more or less, returned to what the camera is giving me.

The turning point was getting a bunch of images rejected by a microstock agency for noise. The more you twiddle with the knobs and sliders, the more the pixels get jumbled and start to do weird things in the shadows, not allowed when you are dealing with customers.

I still want better images though and so today I shot my first raw. In fact, I set the camera to shoot JPEG and raw at the same time. This allows me to edit down my shots using JPEG, so I only need keep the important raw files.

The raw files are huge, 17M for my camera, which gives you some idea of the in-camera compression that is going on when the files are reduced to under 6M. I had to download 'capture NX2' as the files would not load into CS5. The side by side differences are quite startling.

I won't be working in raw for all my shots, only the important keepers. You will never see any difference on blip, as the on-site compression required to keep the site running smoothly, undoes all the good editing work.

I guess the main use is for printing. The raw files can be saves as TIFF files (96M) and taken to the printing house.

Now I have more software to learn, with more sliders to push and pull. My computer groaned at the extra loading and it took forever to save a TIFF file, so I won't be doing that too often! Photography can get really complicated if you let it!

Dave