Photographs coming Friday
I will never again work with RAW files.
I will never again work with RAW files.
I understand that RAW files are the highest quality file you can get. You can work on them and get either JPEGs or TIFFs or PNGs out of them. But I just don't see the effort needed to be put into them.
When I went on another night photography binge last Friday, I thought that the RAW files the Fujifilm camera writes out (.RAF) would be like a lossless JPEG. It wouldn't be fuzzy, it would clear and wonderful looking.
On that notion, I went out and shot almost 100 photographs. Many of them portraits and long-exposures. While taking the photos and the looking at them on the camera's LCD screen, I thought they were perfect. But I was in for a shock when I got home.
Later that night, the noticed how big the fruits of my labor were.
Each file was between 24 and 27 MB each.
I expected the files to be larger, since they capture RAW data.
After the twenty minutes it took to download the 2 GB of pictures from the camera, I went to open them in Photoshop. Then the shit hit the fan.
After trying to open them, Photoshop gave me an error telling me it didn't understand the files.
I swore when I saw that because according to its own supported file page, it supported the .RAF files the camera put out. I downloaded another photo editor that could open the images.
After a few days with the other photo editor, I decided to give up. I couldn't get full-sized JPEGs from it, and the colours came out flat. After a little Googling, I downloaded a program from Adobe that converts proprietary RAW formats to its open DNG (Digital Negative) format. It took over an hour to convert the images.
After the wait, and now that the images could be opened in Photoshop, I went to work. Or at least tried to.
The images were fuzzy, and I couldn't find a plug-in to de-mosaic the image.
Some of them actually were OK, but the majority were just bad. They were flat, and I just gave up.
I archived the RAW files and now, I'll try to upload some of the DNGs later.
Never shooting in RAW ever again.
