[K(s)evin]

Based on their comments, some members here seem to ignore the automation built into their $2000-$3000 cameras.

You didn't answer either of my two questions.

[Rondec]

I think we need to be clear that there is nothing wrong if someone shoots jpegs with an expensive camera.

My brother bought a Sony A7r IV and shots with it in auto mode (jpegs) and a 28-200 variable aperture zoom. It works for him. He never uses any of the additional features that are on the camera, but he is satisfied with his results and that's fine. If he bought an A1, he would still shoot the same way.

That isn't to say that he couldn't get some improvement with post processing, but I suppose the most important thing is that a photographer is satisfied with their results.

[kypfer]

I think we need to be clear that there is nothing wrong if someone shoots jpegs with an expensive camera.

That's good to know … I'd hate to think I was doing anything wrong

[Wheatfield]

People want to pay one price for a complete program and be done with it. Especially for a light user that doesn't use the program very often, when it actually becomes a worse value proposition to rent the software monthly.

I rather like how Topaz runs their business model. The purchase price gets you one year of updates, but that final version is yours to keep using as long as you want. You have a full product, no longer making use of development services, so no reason to keep paying.

Yup, and then you buy a new camera and your software will no longer open it's files until you pay for another update. Does Topaz work with DNG files yet? If it doesn't, you don't have forwards compatibility like you get with Adobe and DNG files.
I've been paying for Photoshop since version 6.0. Every time a new version came out, there was something added to it that I wanted, and so I upgraded. Generally, I upgraded to ensure my raw processor was sufficiently up to date to process the files from a new camera. My upgrade from 6.0 to 7.0 was to get a raw processor.
The cost to do this was quite a bit more than what I am paying per month for my Photoshop/Lightroom package, and with the package, my software is always as up to date as Adobe makes it.

To be fair, I am something of a power user of the software, someone who is using their image editor to clone out a few stray hairs from their cat pictures and doesn't ever upgrade their cameras won't see much by way of advantage.

The rental model was something that Adobe really didn't want to go with, but the level of piracy of the software more or less forced them into it. At one time, Photoshop was THE MOST PIRATED SOFTWARE in the world, with over 95% of the copies in use being pirated copies and the shareholders were not happy about it.

When your product is being stolen 19 times out of 20, it really behoves you to figure out some way to tighten things up. I'm not saying their way is the right way, but it's the way they came up with, and I suspect they tried every alternative they could find before settling on it, and they wouldn't have had to do anything if their user base had been honest enough to pay for the product rather than steal it.

As an aside, it wasn't just amateurs doing the stealing either. When I was still working at the studio, almost all of the photographers I knew were using pirated Photoshop software, so the argument that people have used that the people stealing it wouldn't buy it anyway falls flat, or that it's not a physical product and so has no intrinsic value is just a very disingenuous way of trying to justify dishonesty and speaks volumes about the person using that argument as a debating point.

---------- Post added May 10th, 2022 at 09:26 AM ----------

I don't understand computers, so I make mistakes that cost me time to undo- and when you get old, time is more precious, so I tend to mess with them as little as possible. Therefore, it should be no surprise that this statement puzzles me. Why should free updates of an already paid for editing program carry any more risk than paid-for updates via subscription? Don't both come from the same company? Do free editing software come with greater security risks than ones paid for?

Anything that links to the internet is a security risk. All software including operating systems, be it from Microsoft or Apple, eventually stop being supported by the vendor, and so stop getting updates, including security patches.

In our photography world, the common issue is that your shiny new camera's raw files won't open on your old software, or your unsupported software won't recognize that new lens you bought and so doesn't identify it properly. We are fortunate that pentax has chosen to use DNG as one of the RAW options as the format is backwards compatible right back to the introduction of the format in 2004. My old laptop still has Photoshop CS2 on it, and it will open DNGs from my 2016 Pentax K1, albeit very slowly. Users of brands that don't offer this have to do an extra step to get their new camera files to open on older Adobe software (Adobe DNG converter).
I don't know how users of unsupported software that doesn't play nice with the DNG format work around this. I suppose they just shoot jpegs after a while.

A lot of updates in the Windows world are security patches, updates designed to keep the bad guys out of your computer. I don't know if the same holds true for Apple, but I do hear a lot of complaints from Apple users that often they break compatibility with older software when the operating system upgrades to a new version (sort of a reverse of the problem we are discussing), thereby forcing their user to upgrade their software to a more current version. This seems a lot less prevalent with Windows.

Once the company stops supplying those patches, your computer can become vulnerable to security issues that come up after the last update.
Anti virus/ malware software can mitigate a lot of this stuff, as can using half a brain cell when running the computer.

I'm not savvy enough to know if individual programs such as image editors can create a security issue, though I see no reason why they couldn't be leveraged into being a security problem.

---------- Post added May 10th, 2022 at 09:42 AM ----------

I think we need to be clear that there is nothing wrong if someone shoots jpegs with an expensive camera.

My brother bought a Sony A7r IV and shots with it in auto mode (jpegs) and a 28-200 variable aperture zoom. It works for him. He never uses any of the additional features that are on the camera, but he is satisfied with his results and that's fine. If he bought an A1, he would still shoot the same way.

That isn't to say that he couldn't get some improvement with post processing, but I suppose the most important thing is that a photographer is satisfied with their results.

Absolutely. For several years the studio I worked at had a gig shooting Santa photos at a few of the local malls. There is absolutely no pretence about this srt of work being anything other that the photographic equivalent of a nuclear wasteland. There is zero creativity involved in this, it's solely a way to make income in the dead zone between graduation photos in the spring, wedding season in the summer and school pictures (another wasteland of creativity) in the fall.
It kept the door open.
Anyway, throughput speed was more important than anything else, we came in in the morning, grabbed the camera cards that were shot the previous day and had a few hours to output several hundred images and get them packaged for shipment back to the mall kiosk.

We didn't have time for raw conversion, and we certainly had no need for it as the lighting setup was designed to allow for jpegs to work. The files were downloaded to a computer, a very fast cull was done in Bridge and the remaining files were run through an action in Photoshop to put a small watermark on the corner to identify the studio. They were then sent to the printer, and packaged for shipment.

OTOH, we did shoot our school pictures in raw, and did minor retouching on almost all of the images, and sometimes did fairly major retouching.

---

Last edited by Wheatfield; 05-10-2022 at 08:45 AM.

[Mooncatt]

Does Topaz work with DNG files yet? If it doesn't, you don't have forwards compatibility like you get with Adobe and DNG files.

Pretty sure it does, though I usually run things through Raw Therapy first and export as TIFF. I do know Topaz advertises you can export as DNG as well, but that isn't very compatible. The last time I tried that, the exported file would only render properly in Topaz programs. If I tried to open in Raw Therapy, it was heavily posterized, and the colors all off.

[reh321]

Pretty sure it does, though I usually run things through Raw Therapy first and export as TIFF. I do know Topaz advertises you can export as DNG as well, but that isn't very compatible. The last time I tried that, the exported file would only render properly in Topaz programs. If I tried to open in Raw Therapy, it was heavily posterized, and the colors all off.

I save everything - once I have made all changes I intend to make - as a JPG with the lowest possible compression.
It is something understood correctly by every photo rendering system.

[Wheatfield]

Pretty sure it does, though I usually run things through Raw Therapy first and export as TIFF. I do know Topaz advertises you can export as DNG as well, but that isn't very compatible. The last time I tried that, the exported file would only render properly in Topaz programs. If I tried to open in Raw Therapy, it was heavily posterized, and the colors all off.

That's sad, it's like they've taken a free to use format and turned it into a proprietary one. OTOH, it's probably not really going to affect anyone's work flow. I suspect most people who are using the DNG format are probably using an Adobe product of some sort.

[35mmfilmfan]

<snip>I suspect most people who are using the DNG format are probably using an Adobe product of some sort.

I use DNG, but process it via FastStone, XnView and Irfanview - all legally free, and providing me with resulting images with which I am happy, or at least content. Not sure if this is a workflow, but I do my amendments in whichever software seems to give the results I like best, export to a different folder as TIFF files, then re-process those to a greater or lesser degree to obtain the final JPG file, saving these in another folder on another drive. This has worked well for me for over five years now, and I see no reason to change.

That's sad, it's like they've taken a free to use format and turned it into a proprietary one. OTOH, it's probably not really going to affect anyone's work flow. I suspect most people who are using the DNG format are probably using an Adobe product of some sort.

I'm using DxO Photolab and Affinity to process my DNG files.

[beholder3]

I use DNG, but process it via FastStone, XnView and Irfanview - all legally free, and providing me with resulting images with which I am happy, or at least content. Not sure if this is a workflow, but I do my amendments in whichever software seems to give the results I like best, export to a different folder as TIFF files, then re-process those to a greater or lesser degree to obtain the final JPG file, saving these in another folder on another drive. This has worked well for me for over five years now, and I see no reason to change.

I am not sure about irfanview, but relatively sure about faststone and xnview.
And I fear you are believing something wrong here…
Xnview can open raw files in the way that it displays the jpg images embedded into the raw file.
It then also can work with those jpgs to adjust them and create a changed output.
But essentially feeding a DNG into xnview and adjusting things there is 100% the same as feeding it a jpg debeloped in the camera.
Result: I fear your approach is actually a full waste of the capabilities of the raw files.
You do need a full raw converter program such as the free darktable or raw therapee to take advantage of a raw file.

---------- Post added 10th May 2022 at 23:06 ----------

I use DNG, but process it via FastStone, XnView and Irfanview - all legally free, and providing me with resulting images with which I am happy, or at least content. Not sure if this is a workflow, but I do my amendments in whichever software seems to give the results I like best, export to a different folder as TIFF files, then re-process those to a greater or lesser degree to obtain the final JPG file, saving these in another folder on another drive. This has worked well for me for over five years now, and I see no reason to change.

I am not sure about irfanview, but relatively sure about faststone and xnview.
And I fear you are believing something wrong here…
Xnview can open raw files in the way that it displays the jpg images embedded into the raw file.
It then also can work with those jpgs to adjust them and create a changed output.
But essentially feeding a DNG into xnview and adjusting things there is 100% the same as feeding it a jpg debeloped in the camera.
Result: I fear your approach is actually a full waste of the capabilities of the raw files.
You do need a full raw converter program such as the free darktable or raw therapee to take advantage of a raw file.

[Mooncatt]

That's sad, it's like they've taken a free to use format and turned it into a proprietary one. OTOH, it's probably not really going to affect anyone's work flow. I suspect most people who are using the DNG format are probably using an Adobe product of some sort.

I don't know of anyone that exports as a DNG, and typically only use it for the initial edit and export into TIFF (for further editing), or jpeg (if a final product). So not sure where you get turning DNG's into a proprietary format.

I did question them about exporting as DNG, and the answer was something along the lines of the image is really a TIFF file in a DNG container, and most programs don't know how to interpret that. In my opinion, other progresses shouldn't have to do that. So I guess it's not so much making things proprietary, but rather not abiding by an established standard. Whatever the case, it's not a function I use and doesn't affect me.

[DafTekno]

Some fascinating insights here.
Wow!

I've managed to get Dark Table working on my PC, and it appears to be the nicest environment (to me) of the group (also containing Fast Stone Picture Viewer, Raw Therapee and GIMP).

On these lovely photos people have posted, managing to bring out details in the shadows, how do you do this?

Is it the Shadows / Highlights section, where you turn up the Shadow value?

Someone posted a beautiful shot of the coast with the sky, and they managed to bring detail from the sky and colour to the foreground.
How was that done?
Just Shadow being turned up again?

Another had a waterfall shot, that they managed to combine multiple shots using an HDR tone map in Photoshop.
That sounds fascinating, as I've often combined multiple shots in the Layers of my Photoshop, to bring together different exposure and focal settings.
How was this done?

Someone pointed out that the exposure meter in the camera was set up for JPEGs, so shooting RAW would mean ignoring it, using Highlight data instead.
How would this be done?

I think I've seen the back screen can display Highlight peak info, not sure if the viewfinder does.

Can referencing the Highlight data be done 'Live' as if looking at the exposure meter through the lens?

I've been looking at several photos I took, when I also saved a RAW version, whilst I play with Dark Table, and everyone is right, the RAW shot, even before any processing, looks vastly better!
Not just shadow detail, but skin tone and reflections in toasters as well!

In one, I was trying to figure out how to make the eyes brighter / stand out, as they did in the rather over exposed JPEG version, but I couldn't figure out which effect process concentrated on the sparkle in the eyes.

As RAW seems to prefer underexposed images, I suspect my ability to judge the correct amount of under exposure for later editing extraction would be via either this Highlight peaking data or by getting used to how much on average a shot should look 'a bit too dark' in the review screen.

But then, if the in camera review is basically a JPEG thumbnail attached to the RAW file, then judging exposure from it may be suspect, as the JPEG thumbnail may include the JPEG detail issues (exposure / colour / detail) previously mentioned here.

So, does that mean you can't judge a RAW photo from in-camera reviewing..?

Well, I imagine you could verify composure / framing / focus, but not exposure / colour / potential detail..?

All fascinating information here!

And SACD players... Goodness!
I have a couple of SACDs, but never really got into the concept, despite it's technical brilliance.

[Mooncatt]

So, does that mean you can't judge a RAW photo from in-camera reviewing..?

Well, I imagine you could verify composure / framing / focus, but not exposure / colour / potential detail..?

I would say you shouldn't fully judge any photo on the camera. It's nice for a quick review, but it's low resolution and you'll never see all the fine details like you can on a full monitor (especially if it's a dedicated editing monitor). I would use the in-camera review for composure checking, especially if it's an action shot, but little more beyond that. I wouldn't even trust it completely for focus accuracy because a missed focus can be effectively hidden by the low resolution. I've had several shots I think looked good in-camera that turned out to be scrapped because I noticed a focus issue on my monitor.

[iheiramo]

As RAW seems to prefer underexposed images, I suspect my ability to judge the correct amount of under exposure for later editing extraction would be via either this Highlight peaking data or by getting used to how much on average a shot should look 'a bit too dark' in the review screen.

When I shoot I follow histogram and try to keep data away from the edges. If dynamic range is too much for the censor, I lean against black edge and try to keep white at it's minimum. Sometimes it's worthwhile to let some white thru for example when you have sun in the frame. Take different exposures from the same scene and you'll learn what works for you.

Lifting shadows is not traight forward process in my experience as too simply done you'll loose contrast. I use several tools to brighten dark parts, but at the same time try on keep the blacks black and retain colours. It's hard to find the right balance

No HDR stacking used in this. Exposure according to sun and shadow data lifted in pp with Capture 1.

[Ian Stuart Forsyth]

Can referencing the Highlight data be done 'Live' as if looking at the exposure meter through the lens?

Yes it can be done to some extent, the histogram in LV would be your best bet. There would be some need to configure your camera so that you have a better representation

First I would start with UniWB

https://dslrbodies.com/cameras/nikon-and-dslr-camera-faq/what-is-uniwb.html

Introduction to UniWB

https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/beware-histogram


I would also look at finding a way to view your cameras raw file, this will give you a better idea as to what is contained in the raw file

Fast raw viewer is a good place to start
https://www.fastrawviewer.com/

Some videos as to how it works

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

I would then look at how your camera handles baseline exposure

https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deriving-hidden-ble-compensation

https://www.fastrawviewer.com/blog/red_flowers_photography_to-see-the-real-picture

https://photographylife.com/where-are-my-mid-tones-baseline-exposure-compensation

Once you know what is happening you can apply the right corrections your raw converter




Some help with understanding how to us HDR scene without the HDR tonemapping most think of when composing hdr images
https://blog.mingthein.com/2014/04/14/hdr-zone-system-dynamic-range/