Help With RAW

[Buadhai]

I recently installed CHDK on my Canon A1000IS. Although I practiced processing RAW photos quite a bit before my recent dive trip, I'm not happy with the results I obtained on that trip. The RAW photos seem rather dull and lack the depth of the JPEGs.

The JPEGs generally require a single click in GIMP using the "Diving Red Filter" script. The RAW photos take many minutes of fiddling.

What am I doing wrong?

In the attached files: processed RAW on the left, enhanced JPEG on the right.

 

[gustele]

You are not necessarily doing anything wrong. With JPG the camera does the processing for you; with RAW you have to do this yourself but you should be able to get at least the same result as with processed JPG. For the picture with the Whale Shark you have to find the correct white balance (UFRAW) to get the correct colors; that takes some experience which you will get by doing it more. I always use the WB-dropper to select a point in the picture that is a neutral gray (underside of the Whale Shark is a good option or, in case there is a diver in the picture, the tank). After you determined the right color balance you can play with saturation, contrast to get a more vivid look.
Using RAW gives you more room for improvement by adjusting exposure and correcting white balance but it takes more time than working with JPG. Especially for pictures without an external strobe RAW should be able to give you far better results than JPG. I regularly take pictures at 30 meters without strobe and still have excellent results; results that I couldn't get with just JPG. As an example see this link.

 

[bvanant]

Remember processing raw in a single step will only get you to a "better" JPEG than if the camera did it. You can of course apply whatever script you want to the opened raw file. The real advantage of raw is that you can get white balance in post (that you can not get with a JPEG from most cameras) but it still is a starting point. In your gimp macro you are adding back blue; if you thought raw would do that for you not quite.
Bill

 

[Buadhai]

Both answers extremely helpful and exactly what I was looking for.

(gustele, the photos in the link you provided were inspiring indeed. I don't use an external strobe so it was great to see such good results.)