RAW

Here is an example of why I shoot RAW:

Post-processed

Out of the camera

The amount of detail available in the blown-out sky is only possible because I shot in RAW. For those interested, the post-processing applied, in Aperture, was:

Exposure	-0.3
Black Point	3
Highlights	100
Shadows	17.59

The slight glow around the dome of the building doesn’t bother me enough to do anything about it. Oh, there was also a bit of chromatic aberration around the dome that I removed.

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Looking Forward to…

(in chronological order):

• arrival of Aperture 3.0 that I ordered
• Spring Break Skiing in Taos
• obtaining an iPad

That’s all for the near term.

Stabilization

The lens I ordered last week (Canon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS) arrived yesterday, but I came home too late to really give it a workout. I did take this shot of our dog, Hershey, as a test of the lens’ stabilization.

Handheld, no flash, .3" f/5.6 200mm ISO 1600

As noted in the caption, this was as 3/10 second exposure at focal length of 200mm (on a 1.6x crop factor camera). This image is the jpeg generated from the RAW in Aperture with no color correction or other explicit modifications, though it is resized down for the web and I’m sure Aperture probably applies some sharpening for that.

Here is a 100% crop of Hershey’s eye. You can see here that the image is not pixel-level sharp, but a significant portion of that can also be attributed to the ISO 1600 that I had to use — obviously, there wasn’t much light to work with.

Still, I am very impressed. On my crop camera, the rule of thumb is that I would need a shutter speed of 1/320 of a second to account for the effective focal length to take such a shot handheld. At 3/10 of a second, this shot was 96 times longer (about 6 1/2 stops). Even though it isn’t perfectly sharp, I think that’s pretty amazing. Of course, this was a single shot rather than a battery of shots, so I could have just gotten lucky.

The girls and I are going to the San Antonio Zoo tomorrow, so I’ll give this lens a real workout then. And it’ll get some interior exercise today at my nephew’s birthday party, though I may be using the flash for most of those shots.

RAW Image Archival with Aperture?

I really like Apple’s Aperture for image management. At first I thought they keywording system was not quite up to par with the best system I’ve used (KPhotoAlbum), but then I found a third method (Keyword Controls) that got closer and then a fourth method (the Keywords sub-tab of the Metadata Inspector). (The first method is simply typing full keywords into the appropriate Metadata field and the second method is the Keyword HUD drag-and-drop system.)

Even with all of these methods, there are still a few kinks, but that’s not the point of this post. This is about what to do with RAW files after I’m done generating the JPEGs. My previous workflow resulted in burning the RAW files to DVDs and saving only the JPEGs on my system. With Aperture, however, the RAW file becomes the Master image and is basically inseparable from the image itself.

What I really need is an action (most likely an Automator script) that can archive a Project, Folder or Album in such a way that all of the metadata is preserved with the archive but the RAW is removed from the Library. The Master left in the library would most likely be a JPEG with optionally reduced resolution. Ideally, the system would still let me make further image modifications, but with a warning that the original was unavailable and the edits may be sub-optimal, and it would allow me to access the archived data if desired.