iPhoto & RAW Monarch Butterflies
We went to Natural Bridges State Beach to visit the Monarch butterflies on their annual wintering in a eucalyptus grove. It was incredible. Here is this random grove of trees only a mile or two from downtown Santa Cruz within which many thousands of Monarch butterflies live for 4 months of the year. There were clusters of thousands of butterflies huddled together on a single branch while several hundred more fluttered around over our heads.
And, of course, I took my camera along to both capture the moment and to test something out. In particular, iPhoto can now handle RAW images just fine. I had been avoiding RAW because the desktop tools for dealing with RAW are teh suck. So, I threw the camera into RAW+Fine mode. Each photo is written twice to the CF card; once as RAW data and once as JPEG on the highest quality compression level.
The purpose was two fold. First, if RAW handling just didn’t work, I would have a lesser quality backup. Secondly, I wanted to compare the two to see exactly what the difference was.
Wow. What a surprise.
Pictured at right is the detail of a section of the above picture. The left image is RAW and the right image is JPEG. No post processing was applied. The only difference is how the camera encoded the image.
Of course, both of these images have been scaled and re-compressed by Flickr. Click through to see the original images (which is still lossy compressed compared to the RAW original).
To address that, the side by side on the left is a screenshot of two iPhoto windows overlayed where the left is the JPEG image and the right is the RAW. Click through for the full sized image (which isn’t large), but even the thumbnail sized shows a noticeable difference.
I expected to see aliasing and compression artifacts in the JPEG image. What surprised me, though, was how much the color saturation seems to be muted in the JPEG version of the image. The RAW images simply appear to be a much higher fidelity image all around; not just sharper/clearer.
Of course, my camera is now configured to shoot only RAW whenever possible. Why Canon doesn’t enable RAW shots in full auto mode is an irritating mystery.
And, yes, I’m counting the days until Aperture arrives.
November 10th, 2005 at 7:54 am
Very interesting, keep on writing about this!
My dad just got himself an EOS 350D and I’m pretty sure there’ll start to be questions soon, particularly considering the mystic RAW stuff. (And judging from the internet Apple’s support for the European version of the camera is broken, so I dread that…)
From having seen RAW image handling at a friend’s place, I got the impression that, yes, there’s a lot of potential goodness in that format. But whether you get perfect results seems to depend on the software you’re using and the photo you’re looking at. So I’d be interested to hear whether you’re getting that much better results on all images or this has just been luck.
November 10th, 2005 at 8:17 am
BTW, you might want to grab my old ‘Image Difference” sample, and have a look at the error image you get by subtracting the JPEG from the original.
Someday I’ll get around to re-doing that sample in a QC composition.
-jcr
November 10th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
It’s a coincidence that the RAW image in this case happens to look “better.”
Think of it this way: the RAW is the negative, the JPG is the finished product. The main decisions to be made when converting between the two (eliding all discussion of substantive editing) are: (a) What color balance (including saturation) to use, (b) how much noise reduction to do on the image, and (c) how much sharpening / edge contrast enhancement to do on the image.
So what you see in the RAW image is simply the photo before those three decisions (and others) were made by Canon’s in-camera JPG conversion. The fact that this photo looks better in “raw RAW” should not be taken as an indication that all images look better in “raw RAW”. Even if you capture only in RAW, you still have to make those decisions at some point. Many photos will look completely buggered until you fix the white balance, or sharpen them a bit.
The tradeoff is that you get more control when working with a RAW image, but that also means you have to do more work.
-peterb
November 10th, 2005 at 2:51 pm
That makes sense. So far, every photo has looked significantly better — has had more dynamic range — in RAW vs. JPEG. Now, my sample set is stupid-small, so this is certainly not anything to draw a conclusion from.
November 10th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
You can give the camera some guideance about how to convert the RAW to JPG by using the “Parameters” submenu. Options include:
Parameters (Parameter 1,2, Set 1, 2, 3, B&W) - Parameters 1 and 2 are preset; Parameter 1 has higher contrast, saturation, and sharpness, while parameter 2 has everything zeroed out; B&W is the black and white mode which also allows for filter and toning effects; For sets 1-3 you can set the following options:
Contrast (-2 to +2)
Sharpness (-2 to +2)
Saturation (-2 to +2)
Color tone (-2 to +2)
Mind you, I shoot in RAW, because I prefer to defer those decisions as long as possible. But it’s probably worth exploring those options to see if you can get its conversion working the way you like, because sooner or later you’re going to hand the camera to a friend in “green square” mode.
November 10th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
One feature I miss since upgrading from Canon’s S60 to the (quite enjoyable) 350D is the ability to save to raw on-the-fly. I could set it to save JPEG only, but on the occasion that I thought better of it, I just had to hit a button while the picture was still being reviewed to have it saved as a raw file. I rarely post-process my images (have to draw the line somewhere), but I do wonder if the lossy JPEG compression is the limiting factor on detail when other conditions are good.
Unfortunately I haven’t implemented raw support for my current captioning solution yet, so JPEG it is…