OK, here's a 100% crop of my quick edit, and here's the settings... Edited in Gimp with UFRaw plugin. First, I dialed in 1.61 + EV and set DeNoise wavelet noise reduction to 100, about a 10 on a scale of 0-100. Saved as typical highish quality jpeg.
As you can see, it's much darker than Picassa's auto levels [I assume that's what you used] and we can see red blotchy noise in the shadows, but again that's because those areas should be just about black.
RAW, I've found allows some great things. One, no jpeg compression artifacts when starting an edit! Second, because of that we can push exposure quite a ways without nasty things like banding happening. Although, again, +3 EV in shadows will make a mess.
Noise reduction on a RAW file is very nice, and can for free do what the best noise reduction plugins do with jpegs and do it much better to boot. RAW, also shows less noise out of the gate than a jpeg too.
So, no I don't think it needs to go home to mother for help, you just need to practice basic photography principles with regards to exposure etc.
Regards,
Mike
Originally posted by boom Thanks Mike. I'm complete raw to the whole RAW thing, I guess Picasa is doing some undisclosed processing.
You're right, I took that shot in RAW+ and I noticed that the JPEG is darker than Picasa made it out to be.
If you don't mind, could you post your development of that PEF? Or advise me what program you used?