[LeeRunge]

mikesbike, I shoot mainly in M mode because I have 3 takumar lenses, 55 1.8, 85 1.9, 135 3.5 (left over from film days) and 2 DA L kit lenses 18-55 and 50-200. Don't use the DA L 18 to 55 much because of the 55 tak. Use 50-200 a lot for long shots. There is so much to learn with the K5, I bought it a couple years ago because it got some very good reviews on line and the shutter count was 1035 or maybe 1037. Was in mint condition and have been loving it ever since, I retired my 71 Spotmatic, shes an old girl but still takes great pics. I'm sure I will bring her out again, who knows. Thanks for your great advice above, have saved it to word and will print it out to study and play with the K5.

Give the Luminar 4 software a try in trial form, go shoot some RAW files then let it autoedit (it does a good job) with the essentials presets. I think you'll be happy with what it'll do with the shadows on the K5.

You can also edit them with a recent smartphone if its a fast one with and SD card reader and the lightroom app on the go. (it'll do RAW edits).

[Lowell Goudge]

Ok new to the digital world, I know what jpg is but have no idea what raw is or why I should shoot this way. Seems like to me (sounds like an assumption, never good) that one shoots in raw and then converts the image to jpg when saving the image. I know nothing about raw and not a lot about digital photography or even film photography, not a photo techno I just like taking pictures and sometimes actually capture some good ones. I have not been able to find a thread explaining what raw is, or why I should shoot this way. Please don't tear my head off I don't live photography but do love to take pictures. Any and all help is greatly appreciated, even if you do tear off part of my head. Please leave enough for my wife to swing a skillet at.

I haven’t seen a good answer yet so I will try.

JPEG is an image format designed to offer compression of the file size, in varying degrees, by saving the image as chunks with a common element such as illumination color etc, and then overlapping these chunks to create the image. Most of this can be eliminated by saving JPEGs in the highest quality (Lowest compression) format available.

In addition And most important for photographers is JPEG limits the range of colours to 8 bits or 256 different levels for each primary color plus grey. This sounds like a lot, and it is for most shots but....

Most camera sensors have 12 or 14 bit sensors, storing much finer color graduations

The grading of the colors in jpeg is not linear. If you experiment a little, you will find about 5 stops of linear exposure centered around a greyscale value of 128, with each stop having a range of 40. At each end, you will find a non linear zone of about 2 1/2 - 3 stops, where the range of the first stop is about 18 the second stop about 7 and the final stop about 3.

What this means is that with jpeg although you have 11 stops of dynamic range, the granularity at the extremes is very limited, meaning that if you want to make large adjustments The image quality suffers badly. Additionally even with the middle range of the jpeg image, large adjustments can lead to “banding” especially where the color is almost uniform to begin with. Try this on a blue sky, and you will see if you expand the middle range of the image exposure you will generate broad uniform color patches in bands as the lighting changes across the frame.

The other aspect of JPEG and this is analogous to film, is that the camera processes things before saving, contrast, white balance, etc.... so it is like selecting Kodachrome for warm shots or ektachrome for cooler shots, etc, and then exposing as you desire . As a result, a large portion of processing is done before the image is saved, and this is irreversible. Whether this is a bad thing has been hotly debated for years and there is no true winner.

RAW images Biggest advantage is that it stores the image in the full color depth of the sensor, This Allows for wider ranges of adjustment especially at the ends of the exposure scale. When people discuss rescuing a badly shot picture, this is what they rely on.

The other advantage of raw images, depending on the processor used, is that you do not actually save your changes as an image, but as an “adjustment” to be applied to the image, This can leave the base image intact. You can go back and try different processing without risk of data loss, saving only the images you like, in a final format.(jpeg or TIFF)

It is up to you what you want to shoot, and your camera let’s you shoot jpeg plus raw so if you like the images the camera produces in jpeg fine, but if you want to play more, or blow a shot, you can use the raw file. The issue is that raw files are unique to each camera model and you need software to display them, this makes sharing difficult, jpeg is for sharing.

[Retro Snapper]

This has been a great thread. Not too techy, I have learnt a lot. I am in a similar place to dipo 1, K-7 with film era k-mount lenses and contemplating shooting in RAW. This forum really is the font of all knowledge. Thank you for educating a newby. Dean.