Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
It looks good enough to be worth trying to print a bit larger than that?
I am pleased you have posted the series, as I often wonder if this rather strange process is what is meant to happen to an image or whether I was doing something wrong and creating unecessary work.
The only comment is whether you are converting slightly early in the process? The result says 'no' and it is what I now do for older 350D .CR2 images*. However it does mean that the last phase does not have access to the full range of stuff in the RAW file doesn't it?
Not sure what you use for conversion, but Duncan sent over some Capture 1 screens (and I looked at one or two macThings) and they seemed to have a lot of fine tuning gadgets if one can get round the technology behind it. Fortunately no longer a problem now I have gone Nikon and use NX2 where there is no need to convert at all except for web jpgs.
*some grovelling apologies  due in this area, I think you did try to point out how limited DPP was before I came to the same conclusion empirically |
Hi Chris, generally I do very little processing in raw apart from tweaking the exposure and cropping - I then convert to a 16bit TIFF and send to CR2.
A big advantage of shooting a RAW file is that you can convert to 16-bit TIFF file before the main editing starts. TIFF files are larger than JPEG files, but they retain the full quality of the image. They can be compressed or uncompressed, but the compression scheme is lossless, meaning that although the file gets a little smaller, no information is lost. It is only when I have finished editing that I convert to a 8 bit file which allows to be saved as a jpeg.
Re the printing size, the image is only 800 pixels which means that printing at say 200 dpi would only give a 4" image. For a 6" image you would have to print at 133 dpi. If you printed at 10" you would be at 80dpi which would be cr*p quality IMO.
edit Where a lot of people go wrong IMO is that they convert the raw to a jpeg (8bit) and then do more editing with this lossy format.