PhotoShop CS5

[W3MIV]

Unless you plan to use your photos for publication, there is little to be gained for most people to take the added step of manipulating raw files. The advantages, however, far outweigh the inconvenience. A raw file can be manipulated to adjust every single creative aspect, and most of the photographic aspects. When shooting raw, all you need to worry about is your ISO setting and the basic exposure. Since there is no manipulation whatever taking place in the camera, nothing is lost in the image that was recorded by the sensor. When you shoot a JPEG file, the camera's processor makes the decisions about how to compress your image to make it fit an arbitrary size. Even though a TIFF is not compressed with a lossy algorithm, the camera is choosing what to keep and what to discard. With raw files, those decisions are left to you.

Read that line again. Color balance may be changed and reset anywhere along the spectrum of visible light. No worry about white point. No worry about fluorescent lighting or somebody's too-dim, too-red living room. The entire exposure range can be expanded or compressed as you wish. Best of all, once you have manipulated the frame and saved it as a TIFF or a JPEG file, the original raw file remains unchanged. It is a well you can go back to again and again, making subtler changes or more radical changes as you wish, all without touching the original. It is like having a film negative in the sleeve that you can put in your enlarger again and again and again.

The only drawback to raw is the size of the files. They are large, and they take a lot longer to move from the sensor through the digic to the storage medium. That limits the number of quick shots you can make.

[W1GUH]

Thanks, Albi. You nailed it about RAW files, and why I love them. Most of the time, the camera processing is OK -- but there are times when it's glaringly off. At those times I'm glad to have the RAW file to use.

And cheesh! The RAW files are BIG...but with an 8 GB card I can pretty much shoot all day in "Save RAW and JPG mode" and not come close to filling it. But you're right...it's time consuming to move them.

[W3MIV]

PhotoShop is definitely more than is needed for nearly any reasonable work on photographs. Most cameras come with software that permits manipulation that fits most people's needs; PhotoShop Elements brings together a lot of what PS offers the photographer in an easy and uniform workflow.

My need for PhotoShop is for managing graphics workflow more than photographic. The recent example of merging a series of shots (not properly shot by the photog for use as a panorama) to form a plausible background, then the silhouetting of twenty-one men and women, adjusting their color and lighting so that all of them are reasonably uniform (they were shot on different days in different locations) and making sure their "edges" were cleanly anti-aliased and did not show matting or color fringing from the original background from which each was lifted, then positioning them across the frame in a plausible pose so that the entire image would seem to have been a single shot from a super Widelux is an example of where PS shines. The new CS5 especially so.

It is a very expensive program, but when it comes to that sort of work there is nothing really comparable.