Well I wasn't too happy with the noise in my last shots so I got to playing with settings and decided to try shooting in Raw.

I'm impressed, the quality level of the shots is much better. However my photoshop wouldn't open them, so I had to upgrade my origional Pentax browser and lab programs to deal with them. I'm not real impressed with that program. The auto fix results were terrible. I opted to just crop in the Pentax program then save the result to Jpeg and work it in photoshop from there. Any tips? I have no idea why Photoshop wouldn't open these, it does have raw in the list of types of images it will handle, although my version is pretty old.

Anyhow, here are a few results.

Tulip in the neighbour's yard, shot from about 20 feet with my 80-320 lens.


Another from the same distance..


And a flower in a pot from about 5 feet, same lens.


Feel free to make suggestions and share any tips on using the Pentax program. I'm totally new to this raw stuff, although I can already see a lot of advantages to it.

[Vertex Ninja]

Do you have the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw, 3.7 I think? Not sure if that's it, but I'd give it a try.

[hyson]

Red "x"s for me.... Anyone else?

[khardur]

ACR is up to 4.0 now.

the Pentax Photo Laboratory is actually not bad, just the interface is clunky. if you shoot raw, why auto fix anything? that's the point. my only gripe with PPL is it doesn't show you what your white balance temperature was when you have it set at "as shot" - helpful if you just want to slide it one way or the other just a little bit.

if you learn it, it's great if you have a bunch of similar images you want to convert all at the same time, you can batch convert them. of course I'm sure there are other programs and workflows that suit people differently.

[Mr CJ]

Are your RAW shots in PEF or DNG? If they're in PEF, then unless you have Photoshop 7+ (I believe), you won't be able to open them. ACR 3.6 supports PEF files, but you have to have a version of photoshop that supports ACR 3.6. Instead of saving as a jpeg after you do your crop, save it as a tiff. Jpeg is a compressed format, and during the compression something has to "go" in order to get the best compression (usually it's your colors). Tiff however is an uncompressed file format that any image viewer can open. Save them as tiff (8 bit) then open and edit in photoshop.

[NaClH2O]

Hi Scott. Download the latest version of ACR from the Adobe site. (4.0 I believe) I have ACR 3.5 and it will open PEF files (at least the ones from my DS), so I'm sure the newer ones will too. You can also download a DNG converter from Adobe. I have version 3.5 it will convert PEF files to DNG and you can then easily work with DNG from almost any Photoshop product.

NaCl(btw, nice tulips and a GREAT pansy! )H2O

[scott-devon]

Thanks for the great suggestions guys! I'll give them a whirl for sure.