Digital Shutters

Are you so scared of RAW that you still stick to shooting with JPEG even if you now have your brand-new digital SLR camera?

With DSLR’s now becoming more affordable, many capable photographers from the point-and-shoot crowd have recently graduated to serious photography by using the more advanced digital single-lens-reflex cameras. But many of them were familiar only with the default JPEG file format of the compact digicams, and are now stumped by the unfamiliar territory of RAW files. What to do?

Well, fear no more. Help is on the way.

First, there’s this helpful guy, Michael Tapes (you know him? He’s an alpha male who gets to test-drive first whatever Adobe comes up with, alpha tester they call him) who shows us how to use Adobe Lightroom (it’s in Beta 4 now).

Now, Adobe Lightroom is kind of new too, even to Adobe (those same guys who brought us Photoshop). They came up with Lightroom to meet the needs of the growing population of DSLR users who shoot in RAW. Lightroom is a RAW file converter and what it does is download your metadata-laden RAW digital photo from your camera to your computer and then in your computer Lightroom can manipulate your photos just as any good imaging software does.

But more than that, it also allows you to sort, catalog, present and print your digital pictures in a professional way. In short, the whole nine yards of the photographic workflow. Thus, the name Lightroom, like in the old days of film photography when they used a light table and a darkroom to produce those classic photographs (get it? light table to darkroom…naah, I just made that up).

Now back to Michael. He’s got these videos on his website, RawWorkflow.com, and in there he takes us by the hand and walks us through the whole process of getting to know Lightroom so we can work in RAW.

He’s chopped the video tutorial into several bite-size pieces for us to easily chomp on it and he covers the really important things like the user interface, importing files and the Develop module, including how to use the Basic and Tone Curve panels, plus the crop tool.

So head on over to RawWorkflow.com and see for yourself what RAW and Lightroom are all about. It’s free.

When you’re done, come back here for more because there’s also this eBook, The Photographer’s Guide to Capture NX, which teaches us more about working with RAW.

The Photographer’s Guide to Capture NX, is a 180-page PDF eBook by photographer Jason P. Odell and is a must-have guide for new Nikon owners who wish to use the latest version of Capture NX.

And what the heck is Capture NX? That’s Nikon’s imaging software to process your Nikon photos from your Nikon cameras. After buying your expensive Nikon DSLR for more than a thousand bucks, you still have to cough up $150 to get Capture NX (can’t you just bundle this for free, Nikon?).

Anyways, back to our RAW files and this Odell eBook. What is RAW? It is a file format created by a camera which support it, and it still contains the unaltered hence, raw, metadata or information of the digital picture. It is useful for precisely the complete information it still contains. But you can’t just display your RAW picture on your computer by using an image browser; it has to be processed first. And that’s the job of Capture NX.

The job of Odell’s eBook is to make you understand Capture NX. See the whole picture now? OK.

Odell says, “this book allows photographers to sit down with actual RAW files and process them in a step-by-step manner.” Each chapter is illustrated with dozens of screen shots, giving readers simple, step-by-step instructions on everything from opening files to noise reduction, sharpening, and printing. In addition to the book, readers are treated to a full suite of ready-to-use settings files for Capture NX, and can download all the actual NEF (that’s Nikon’s RAW) files used in the tutorials from a special users-only website.

You may download the eBook from Luminescent. Just remember, it’s not free. You have to pay for it.

Now, are you more scared of RAW? (chrismalinao)