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December 15, 2004 Photography 2.0: Raw Processing
I recently spent three days in an advanced photography class with members of the Photoshop team. Eddie Soloway, who teaches at the Santa Fe Workshops, came in and walked us through everything from the basics to more advanced concepts in photography. I got a chance to put my Nikon D70 to the test and shot about 300 pictures over the three days.
So this is where Photography 2.0 comes in. Everyday I would come back from a shoot and use a prerelease copy of the new version of Photoshop to do all my work. 
I can't go in to the details of the new version for obvious reasons, but what struck me was that the raw processing workflow was much, much smoother and more pleasant than in the past. We've hit the point where you shoot raw not just for the added control, but for a user experience that you can't match by shooting TIFF or JPEG.
What is raw processing? It is the combination of a file format and a way to interpret the information within the file format. For example, my Nikon can save files in NEF format. This is a Nikon specific format that encodes the low-level camera information directly in to the file. This allows me to modify important attributes such as the White Balance or Exposure after the photo was taken, and do so in a non-destructive way. Photoshop's Camera Raw dialog allows me to revert to the original camera settings or save my settings as a profile to then apply to other images that I took (which is helpful if you're forgetful like me and don't remember to change your White Balance until after you've taken five or ten shots).
There is a lot of debate surrounding raw file formats, largely because they are proprietary and different for each camera and camera manufacturer. Nikon claims that they will provide backward compatibility and archival capabilities. Nikon has been around for 80 years and manufactures lenses in this way, which gives them a fair amount of credibility. Thomas Knoll has also introduces a new raw format called DNG which is publicly documented and, therefore, more suitable for archival. None of this will shake out any time soon, but it is clear that moving forward photographers will be spending more and more time working with the raw data and less and less time in what was the traditional color correction environments. From my experience, Thomas Knoll seems to understand this better than anyone else in the world. In a way this is what you would expect. I mean the guy did write the original version of Photoshop.
Posted by johnnie at December 15, 2004 10:47 AM
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