A Quick Word From Yours Truly


Hi, welcome to PJ's blog.

If you've checked out the "About Me" bit you'll see I'm a keen amateur photographer who enjoys all things digital. I mostly like photographing plants and landscapes as they are easy targets ;-) I used to work in Software which sounds more exciting than it is but am now officially a Snr. Project Planner having changed jobs after almost 25yrs in Software. I sometimes wish I could work in photography but that would probably become boring if I did it day in and day out. I used to sponsor a wolf called Luna until she sadly passed away, and love all things "wolfy". Anyhow enjoy the blog and hopefully I'll manage to keep it up to date with what I've been doing and my favourite things!

PJ

Sunday, 27 February 2022

Faffing with Raws and HDR

 

So this weekend has also seen me playing around with some raw images from the M50 with a view to finding a good workflow for HDR.

Normally I shoot jpeg more often than not but wondered if the raw would give me a better starting point, or allow me to shoot a single image and then expose differently to get a set of three images from a single image.

Biggest issue was getting an HDR software to recognise the .CR3 files from the M50 - Win10 won't show a thumbnail either despite downloading/updating some codec.

Found an update for Faststone, the viewer I use to select which images I'm going to keep for further editing which at least allows me to see the .CR3 images - the older version just ignored them.

I'd forgotten the downsides to new cameras now I have an Adobe subscription for Photoshop & Lightroom - everything is seamless with them, no waiting for new camera updates, they just appear as if by magic.

So against my better judgement I downloaded the Canon DPP software in the vain hope that it would help. If nothing else I guess it allows me to convert the raw into a more readable format but then jpegs are already readable so not 100% sure that's much of a win. It's mainly around the noise reduction settings that I stress over shooting raw because this isn't applied to the raw and unless I use DPP, software such as Lightroom and Photoshop can't apply the same level because the data is proprietary to Canon and they don't share it. 

Which bring me back to why am I bothering I guess? Why not just stick to the jpeg and be done with it. My camera offers a built-in HDR which sometimes works well and sometimes looks a little flat.

Maybe I just need to experiment more with the right sort of subject - take a selection of images in different forms and see what works best...

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