whats the advantage of .raw over .tif over .jpeg??

[eric s]

The problem with situations with artificial lighting is that the lights have color tints to them that you might not pick up with the numan eye. It actually takes a lot of effort to get a "white" light. Most are have a yellow tint to them, but others have a blue.

Artificial lighting (especially from multiple light sources) is really hard to get "Right" in camera. If your camera can create custom white balances, then you can take a picture of a piece of white paper and tell the camera "that is white". The problem with this is many lights have a flicker to them which means that the lighting won't be the same when you take the custome white balance picture as when you take the actual picture. And many situations you cann't take a picture to capture what "white is" 'cuase you get one and only one shot at it.

With RAW you apply the white balance later, so you can tweek it to your heart's content. This is what I do. And I shoot wild animals, and people know what they should look like and "wrong" is obviously wrong.

Also, the camera doesn't "see" like the human eye, so the images will look different. You're goal should be to make it look good, not make it look "Right" unless (like in my situation) right really matters.

Eric

[VTphotog]

tclune wrote:

To my eye, white doesn't look white in many lighting conditions. If I do a manual white balance, the colors are pushed too far toward white. I lose the apparent bias of the actual view. If, on the other hand, I select a built-in white balance, I often get an accentuated bias. Is this some odd physiological quirk of my vision, or do most people find the same problem?

I don't know about most people, but this is a common situation in photography, and one of the best reasons to shoot RAW . Our eyes, or brain, actually, compensate for light which has a color cast, and tell us that this object is really white, even if an objective measurement would say differently. In dimmer light, the eye's adjustment is not as pronounced, so we do see the yellow, or orange cast in the mid tones and shadows more than in the highlights. Software in camera or computer, tries to mimic the eye's response and some software writers succeed better than others.

Raw converters are not all the same as to the way they interpret the WB from a camera either. I have tried several, and find that each gives somewhat different results. Those that use the absolute color temp scale (Kelvin) report different values for the camera settings, and even when set to the same value, give different color rendition. The bottom line here is that the standard you need to use is the old Mark 1 eyeball.

brian