What software for processing Raw
 

I have a Nikon D50 & a Fuji Finepix 6500.After always shooting jpeg images I have decided to give raw a try.I expect the D50 will see most use in raw mode but the Fuji has raw capability as well.I have been looking at Nikon Capture NX or Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.At the moment all my digital editing is completed using Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10.
Perhaps someone could advise what would be the best move.Do I get rid of the Microsoft software ? Any advise would be most gratefully received.

Hi Horace. I converted to RAW a little while ago and won't shoot using anything else when using Canon. I use Raw Shooter Essentials and find it very good (much better than Canons DPP, which put me off RAW at first). RSE is a free download and worth trying (Google Raw Shooter Essential - it's now owned by Adobe).

If you shoot Nikon, there is no finer RAW conversion and editting tool than Nikon Capture NX.

Check the Nikon website for a 30 day trial.

Hi Horace, I use Bibble pro and Photoshop CS2 for editing and Faststone image browser for browsing.

Alan

Thanks Gents I will check these out.
Stephen

If you use Nikon, and can afford it, then NX appears to be the weapon of choice. If you're a bit strapped for cash, then Phase One's excellent Capture One is a good choice. If you buy a Sandisk Extreme III 2GB SD card from here:
http://www.picstop.co.uk/Secure-Digi...%29-Card---2GB
for the princely sum of £17.40 + £1.50 P&P, then it will come with a slip printed with a licence activation for Capture One LE (C1). This was certainly true as of last week when I bought a couple. The licence works fine, I installed a copy on my 2nd PC.

For anyone who buys a card and finds they are no longer shipping with a licence for C1, you can buy a copy of C1 here:
http://www.calumetphoto.co.uk/item/650-200Z/
It's gone up recently, they had it for £33 the other week when I looked. :(

I've tried Bibble, Raw Shooter Essentials, Adobe Capture Raw and SilkyPix (superb output for Pentax users, but uuuggggggh, impossible user interface), as well as C1. I find C1 to be an excellent package. Not being a Nikon user, I've never tried NX, but I've yet to find anyone who's tried it and not raved about it. C1 for <£20 and you get a free 2GB SD card with it, seems a much better value package to me though. :D

Oh, and persevere with using raw, it may seem like a lot of faff to begin with, but once you've got the hang of it, you'll never look back. I used to be a die hard jpeg shooter, now I never consider using anything other than raw.

Duncan

Thankyou Duncan some good tips here.As you say C1 seems to be a good deal but I have not ruled out NX yet.If I go with either of the above will that make my MS Digital Image suite redundant ?

thanks
Stephen

Another vote for NX if you are a Nikon user.

You can download a 30 day trial from here http://support.nikontech.com/cgi-bin...php?p_faqid=61

There is a thread ' NX tips & tricks ' with lots of info on it in this forum. All I can suggest is give it a try.

Before getting NX, I used Nikon Capture and before that RawShooter Essentials. In comparison with NX or NC I found RawShooter a pain in the neck.

The major difference when comparing with other image editing programs is that NX has NO clone brush.

It will not recognise Finepix 6500 raw files but you can procees any jpegs on it.

Don

From the information on the NX Hints and Tips thread, it would appear that Nikon NX does a lot of general image processing as well as raw file conversion, I can certainly see the attraction of an all-in-one package for image editing. It is certainly far more fully featured than C1 in this respect.

For the bits you can't do using the raw processor (whichever you chose), Photoshop Elements is probably the best choice in terms of Value For Money. There's a huge amount of tutorials and help information on using Photoshop, both the full package and the more limited (though perfectly adequate for most users) Elements version. Most photography magazines in their "digital darkroom sections" base their instructions on Photoshop. This would make your MS Digital Image suite redundant.

You could use the Adobe Camera Raw plugin with Photoshop Elements, it has a very easy to understand user interface, but personally I find the results a bit dull in comparison to C1.

Elements will set you back around £70.

Anyone had any experience of Adobe Lightroom? It looks appealing at £140 as an all-in-one raw convertion and editing package.

How about Lightroom? and it has clone/healing brush tools and it will process jpgs. It has a great range tools for exposure (both shaddow & highlight), contrast curves, selective colour balance, selective hue & saturation, noise reduction, crop & rotation. It will also create slide shows, web galleries, and you can print from it as well as image library database facilities. In fact it will do just about everything except pixel level editing.

LOL - Duncan you must have been typing your post at the same time as me :D

Just in case other Canon users are looking at this, I find Canon DPP 3 excellent and does, eg, all Clive says Lightroom does; it is 95% intuitive, so may not suit untintuitive types, I suppose Photoshop must actually suit somebody, and I do sometimes finish off in PSE4 to level up or host FocusMagic or NeatImage plug-ins where Layers are useful, about all that is lacking in DPP.

Please excuse my ignorance but will I be able to convert my jpeg files to tiff
format with any of these software programs ?
thanks
Stephen

Stephen,

You can certainly do this with Photoshop Elements, and other variants of Photoshop. You can't do this with any of the raw convertor programs that I've used, can't speak for NX here though.

Duncan

For what its worth you can do with DPP, so I imagine you can with NX. I slightly wonder why you would want to as part of the idea of RAW is that it is, like tiff, lossless, in fact more so because the camera has saved far more info in a RAW file than is needed for any single extraction of the image. It could be useful for further manipulations in programme other than PS; PS keeps changed items going lossless in .PSD format; only problem is that each layer is as big as a .tiff file. I might occasionally do it to carry out very large cut-and-paste operations (eg replacing one face in a group from another image where the guy moved and its not a tri-pod identical base pic) which I would do in mac-only 'Color-it' as you can perform all manipulations on a selection 'live' over the base, maybe other PC progs work similarly.

Sorry for ever having called you Horace, Stephen!

I use DPP and am happy with it. I wish it had a rotate tool included but other than that the new version is pretty good.

Bibble converts JPG to TIFF, but then so does just about everything that has much to do with images.

You will be able to do it Horace but this is normally done the other was around - save the tiff after processing (assuming you shoot in RAW) and then 'save as' to a jpeg if required. If you save to a compressed jpeg and then save this to a tiff you will not get any better quality than the original jpeg.

Thanks for the replies re jpeg to tiff format.My thinking here is that some of my better jpeg files could be converted to tiff to avoid loss of detail over time that you get with jpeg files.Is this thinking logical ??
rgds
Stephen

You only get loss if you continually re-save. If you do a try-out edit of a .jpg file, 'save as' with a modified name. However if you started with a RAW file, it is that that you keep safe and backed up, as you can always generate another .jpg or tif from it. On screen you can't see any difference between a 1st generation .jpg and .tiff. For top quality printing, it may make a difference, but it is better still to print from the original RAW file (as edited) and direct from the conversion programme.

I am used to Canon DPP, which saves your last edit settings along with the RAW info & has excellent print preview; I get the impression NX is an even better (paid for) prog.

photoshop cs3, y anything else? you open it, process it, and there it is in ps, dnt see the point in opening in 85 different raw programs to finally put in ps.. cs3 is the shniz...its why they made it

I use Nikon Capture because the PS CS2 converter just is not up to scratch IMO. Clearly it is different in Canon land.

As a Canon user DPP is an absolute waste of space. For RAW conversion I use Phase One, and now Lightroom.

3 reasons Jamie
(a) RAW conversion parallels the firmware in the camera, so using DPP for canon camera allows you to set the camera parameters neutral or as you find yourself shifting them regularly. Likewise NX for Nikon. :)
(b) the RAW converter in PS(E4) is only a subset of those in DPP/probably NX, not the lot. Saves are then to .png, not the original untouched article
(c) PS is a notoriously user unfriendly programme that also hogs memory, flattens batteries and is generally anti-social. Unfortunately about the only thing that has layers and hosts one or two useful plug-ins, so that is all I use it for. :D

Jamie,

I have no experience of CS3 but I have CS2. Quick check on prices at WHE and CS3 £569 , NX £119.

I just cannot resist this. ;) :D Ever so easy done in NX. So here is a straight conversion from raw, that is full size to play with, but naturally suffered a huge compression to get it here, and the NX result ( excluding the touch of clone on the chimney and resize and sharpen). These were done in CS. About 30 mins worth of time.

Should be a doddle in CS3 if it is the shniz. :rolleyes:

I am not at all sure how ACR deals with NEFs but when I have a bit of time I will check it out.

Don

Couldn't resist combination of Don's steam engine :) and John Crossley's 'waste of space'. :p

Another version of Don's with the large gob of birdshit removed as well, which took about 4 of the 10 minutes operation from original jpg entirely using RGB section of DPP. Not sure why you got rid of the green paint Don and have left more colour in sky (actually I suppose the selective de-colouring is probably what took the time), in fact done very little other than touch of curve-contrasting and the cloning. And that is without having the RAW file and using stronger RAW pane of DPP
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...1&d=1183797590

Very good Chris.

When I took the pic I had the vision of B&W conversion and put back the brass. I did this in the wet darkroom days and the process took ages. The brass being painted back with a fine brush and bleach. So as I had just got NX at the time I thought I would give it a go. You are right about where the time went. In NX the masking layers are automatically created so in essence you can just convert to B&W and then paint back any colour. I have no idea how to do this in Photoshop.

In view of Jamies post I mentioned the relative prices to suggest that you can do a lot without breaking the bank, even if you achieve that through using more than one program.

I have no doubt CS3 is a very powerful program but from my experience with NX and CS2 then I have found NX so much easier to use to do those things that it can ( easier learing curve ). If you run NX then you will need another photo editor to do cloning and some of the fancy pants stuff that Christine, Clive, Craftysnapper and others do.

When I get a chance I will compare how CS deals with a Nikon Raw ( NEF ) file. NX reads all the camera settings and displays the image to suit those camera settings you had when you first open the image. You can then easily change any of those settings. This I found to be the big difference between NX and Rawshooter. Rawshooter although less memory hungry does not seem to recognise any of those settings so you have to reapply. Also a saved as raw file after you have made those adjustments in RSE does not read that info if you open the image at a later date. No such probs in NX or NC4.

To answer an earlier question on NX, a jpeg can be saved as a NEF file ( 8bit ), Tiff file, or jpeg at various step levels of compression. If it is saved as a NEF then all processing actions undertaken are also saved with the image so they can be changed easily at a later date. A processed jpeg saved as NEF is a smaller file size than a straight Tiff.

Don

Photoshop is available in the much cheaper Elements form, about £50 for those who can get on with the Adobe interface. The only thing that seemed to be lacking is curves, for which you have to have 3rd party plug-in, though maybe Lightroom has now got there. On curves the beauty of DPP is that the RGB control window shows levels AND curves in all 3 colours superimposed with main window being a very accurate preview.

If NX doesn't include cloning (as DPP does), then yes a 2nd stage prog is essential; one is anyway for horizon levelling (or use a bubble-cube in the first place?)

Do you really mean "in NX, a jpeg can be saved as a NEF file", ie would it make some of its features available for non-Nikon files?

Hey Stephen, Park cameras are doing NX for £99
http://www.parkcameras.com/ProductDe...tegoryID/32/v/

thanks Chris I will check that out.
Stephen

Chris,

NX will treat any jpeg from any source the same as if it was from a Nikon. The same goes for Tiffs. Naturally shots taken in RAW on a Nikon camera allow for adjustment of lots of things W/B, exposure, colour space etc that are not available options to change in jpeg anyway. All the other features of the program are though.

I will post some screen grabs of these later.

A jpeg saved as a NEF is probably similar to what you get with .PSD. I have not gone the .PSD route to exactly know what you get.

Don

Attatched is a grahic ( NX 1 ) showing the options available in NX depending on file format.

A series of stitched screen grabs show the options in LCH and Levels ( NX 2 ). I thought I would show this as both of these are quite different and more controllable than in CS.

Too much to go into here but other than Control Points are :

Available options for ALL file types includes - USER SELECTED AREA ADJUSTMENTS - Curves, LCH, Contrast/brightness, Saturation/warmth, Colour balance, Colour booster, Noise reduction, Sharpness and blurr. ........ probably missed something out. :)

I will post info in the NX thread when I have time.

Don

RSE doesn't need intuition: it has sliders that have titles such as 'Exposure Compensation' and 'Shadow Contrast'. Anyone who can read can use RSE straight away. It saves as JPEG and TIFF.

Just in case someone is interested, I picked up a brand new shrink wrapped copy of PS CS2 for £250 from FleaBay. IMO it is well worth it. It has some advantages such as nice integration with noise reduction tools, a better sharpening algorithm, and so on.

I was really cheesed off that Nikon charged so much to upgrade from NC4 to NX (originally £50) and now you have to pay the full whack. However, it is currently free with some Nikon cameras.

Has anyone tried www.rawtherapee.com ? There is a http in the address.Someone posted the link on BF ,I had a quick look at the site.Think it is American,free to download,but donations are accepted.Just wondered if anyone had heard of this prog ,or had tried it?.

Why use inferior tools when Capture NX and Photoshop are available? If cost is the problem then go for Photoshop Elements 5 with the updated RAW file (v4.1). It does all you need and more!

nirofo.

Interesting that I seem to be the only Aperture user. I presume that is because I use a Mac. Among its many features, Aperture works with RAW images natively throughout the application. There is no intermediate conversion process and the application uses a nondestructive image-processing engine, which leaves the original image untouched. (I cribbed that off a web-site!) It is a fantastic product that has some very powerful tools.
The highlight/lowlight tool particularly is way-ahead of any other I have tried, including CS3. It can perform excellent B/W conversions and tints as well.

Couldn't agree more.