Well, I've been on the fence about shooting RAW for a little while now. I've heard some a great deal number of sources that I really should. My reluctance stems from not really liking to have to do too much post production work. I really like to get my shots right in camera and not mess with things after the fact.

But this past weekend, I captured some shots in both RAW and JPG formats so I could start comparing them to see what I preferred. Take a look and let me know what you think...

JPG Straight out of the Camera
JPG w/ Auto-Smartfix from PSE8
RAW w/ Brightness +50, Contrast +40, Sharpening 25

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/13th sec at f/11. Image Stabilization on. ISO 200. Post production as noted. Powdermill Nature Reserve, Rector, PA.

In case you're wondering, the flower is a Claytonia carolinana. They are tiny little flowers - probably in the range of 1/2 to 3/4 inch in size - and are some of the early bloomers each spring. I had been to Powdermill a couple weeks earlier, but it was cold the night before and there were no flowers to be found. I made a return trip this weekend and found many of them scattered all over (if you looked closely enough!). I searched around for a good specimen to shoot (most times, the flower faced downwards), and actually ended up accidentally uprooting it while trying to clear some debris around it - I relocated it, replanted it, and took the shots I wanted.

Oddly enough, I specifically remember "under-exposing" this image in the field. The camera kept wanting to meter the scene brighter to get the details in that dirt background, and I specifically wanted to avoid that so that I could maintain as much detail in those white petals as possible. Yet, when I looked at the JPG, it still looked bright and washed-out. Then when I ran it through the Auto Smart-Fix function in Photoshop Elements 8, it made that background even brighter still!

I will be honest, I have no clue what settings I should have chose for the Brightness and Contrast when converting the RAW file to JPG, but I simply slid things along until it looked like I remembered it looking in the field. Probably a little more aggressive than it really was, but that's ok. I had wanted the background dark, and I think the RAW file achieves that. I still have some learning to do to figure out what to do with the RAW conversion.

But for now, place your vote for which version you think looks the nicest.

Thanks for stopping by!

- Bill