manage photos

[Cefiar]

On Friday 24 November 2006 06:13, Jan Claeys wrote:
> Op donderdag 23-11-2006 om 11:29 uur [tijdzone +1100], schreef Cefiar:
> > So, breaking it down into points, basically the process you're using
> > here is:
> >  Camera takes RAW
> >  RAW moved to PC
>
> I think there might be an intermediate step here, for processing the RAW
> data before converting them to something a "normal" paint program can
> use?
>
> >  RAW converted to PSD/TIFF

That's the next step here. The raw data out of most of the pro cameras is 
vendor specific (and even model specific), but conversion to some other 
format (I was using his examples as to the format used) is the main part, 
even if that is an in-memory format. The actual conversion process has a huge 
number of settings that you can change that alter how the image is imported. 
This doesn't just apply to things like how much of the image to import (eg: 
only one colour like green, which is useful for making monochrome images out 
of colour ones), but also things like changing the white balance and the 
colour balance to name just a few.

There's a LOT of settings here, and you can make a lot of improvements to the 
base shot at this time, all pre-editing. If this saves you doing editing 
later, then it's really useful, and some of these settings allow you to get 
back useful images that would otherwise prove hopeless. This is particularly 
useful when you have a lot of images to import, and they were all taken under 
the same conditions (eg: studios with fixed lighting). It would be very 
useful if you could have profiles of such settings, so apart from the last 
used one (great for small numbers of photos at the same time), you could save 
the import settings so that you could recall them up at a later time.

> >  Image edited in PSD/TIFF
>
> I think he doesn't really care about those exact file format?

True. It was based on the example he gave though. I was just trying to break 
it down into steps rather than a dialog. I tend to find that people who do 
not have english as a primary language (of which there are a fair number of 
people out there) tend to understand a number of steps better than a 
sentence. A lot can get lost in the conversion of sentences, as their more 
complex structure leads to multiple ways of interpretation, and therefore 
ambiguity.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net