Beginner Needs Help!!

[jcrews5508]

Guys,

After finally getting my skills down after my first year of diving I’ve decided that now I want to start taking some memories back with me to show friends and family. As such I just ponied up and bought my first camera and housing. I purchased a new s90 and have paired it with an ikelite housing and should be picking up an 8 or 16 gb card tonight. (Strobe to come later but want to master the camera first) Now I have a few questions. I’ve noticed the debate between raw and Jpeg so my question is what does raw entail? I understand it’s a setting that appears to be a bit superior than jpeg when it comes to editing. My first question is, is raw a good option for my set up and if so do I need special software to view or edit the images. Next, how difficult is editing? Sorry for all the questions but I love to learn when I take on a new hobby and underwater photography has so much available info it takes a while to decipher what a beginner needs to know vs. what it way out of my league..

 

[RussatL3]

You will need Photoshop to edit the pictures. I will be corrected but I think you need Photoshop to see the pictures outside your camera viewer. It maybe that a program other than Photoshop is used for RAW but it's the program I have so I use it.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

Wow. It sounds like you are talking about tackling 3 new hobbies (diving, UW photography, digital photoediting) all at once. That's fairly ambitious.

To simplify, RAW is essentially all of the data that the photosensor inside the camera "sees." There are no compression algorithms applied to the data to decrease the size of the file. No information is lost. Contrast this with shooting in JPEG. The light information seen by the photosensor is compressed to decrease the size of the file. This process of compression necessarily throws out some of the original data.

For the purposes of photoediting, it makes sense that the more remaining starting material you have to work with...the better. That's why certain people prefer to shoot in RAW when they can. The trade-off is that the memory size of each photo file will be larger.

You can put as much or as little effort into photoediting as you like. From what I've seen, amateurs like yourself who become interested in UW photography without a background in photography (or digital photoediting) generally lack the patience/time/desire/energy to do proper post-processing. You kind of need to ask yourself: "How much time do I want to spend tweaking white balance, sharpening, cropping, and getting rid of backscatter?"

I do a fair amount of UW macrophotography locally...mainly nudibranch portraits. The nudis are colorful and move very slowly, so they make excellent subjects. For such photos, I'm always using a flash. If I can't get good/very good/excellent exposure at the time of taking the photo, I probably don't want to spend much time futzing with the photo in post-processing. There's only so much lipstick one can put on a pig. The wide-angle photos that I take with a simple P&S camera (and without an external strobe setup) are a different story altogether. Those types of photos can benefit significantly by turning off the flash, shooting in RAW, and performing white balancing during post-processing.

I'm a Mac guy. I like using Aperture. Adobe Lightroom is also very good. With certain photos, I'll go to the trouble of using Adobe Photoshop. For most UW photography amateurs, using these software packages is overkill. A combination of iPhoto and GraphicConverter would probably suffice. FWIW, iPhoto reads RAW camera files. Some seem to like using Photoshop Elements. If you're a PC person, you'll have different options.

If you want a free cross-platform software package for photoediting, Picasa might fit the bill. Check it out if you're interested. FYI, Picasa should have no issues reading Canon RAW files.

Hope this helps...

 

[Larry C]

If you don't have a strobe, raw is a great idea. You'll want to adjust your pictures later to get the blue out. Most editing can be done in Photoshop Elements, which you can get for about $80, sometimes as little as $50 on sale. I shoot in both RAW and JPEG so I can look at the JPEGS before deciding which ones to edit in RAW form. Then, get rid of the crap because RAW takes up huge amounts of memory.

 

[PatW]

Well, in a JPEG file, the camera's little computer takes the RAW input and modifys it to produce the image it thinks is there. JPEG is a compressed data mode and as such, you can store more photos in less memory. RAW is a file that stores all of the information. RAW takes more memory than JPEG. Quite a bit more memory in facts. But it allows you to change the White Balance in post processing without penalty. RAW also gives you far more latitude in modifying exposure, high lights and shadows than JPEG. Since underwater photography is awfully tricky, you will do far better with a RAW format than with JPEG. Your camera should have come with a little RAW processing program. Photoshop elements also has a RAW processing program.

A strobe is great to have in underwater photography. You lose the red color below 15'. Unless you replace the reds with artificial light, you are not going to see the actual colors.

 

[highdesert]

Hi jcrews -

The good news ... Photoshop not required! Nothing against it ... it's a great program, but pricey and a lot to learn . Canon DPP (Digital Photo Professional) came with your camera, if you have a CD in the box. If not, it's free to download at the Canon site. It's tweaked just for Canon cameras, and unless you need magazine quality prints (maybe even then) it does an excellent job, both for viewing your RAW files and editing them and your JPEGs. And because it's a much leaner program than Photoshop, it's easy to load and run on a small trip-sized laptop.