Fire on the Peaks

[brandon]

Only 1 photo again in this post but I have some words to go along with this one. Alright so last night's sunset was pretty cool........the photo turned out decent as well but it was still boring......just silohuetted mountains with an orange backdrop......still, nothing wrong with that, but I have been wanting to include some clouds in the photo. The weather here, above the blanket of fog, has been crystal clear the last few nights. The weather forecast is calling for some precip near Vancouver Island. So with that in mind I headed up Grouse Mountain again tonight to look for the sunset avec cloud photo I wanted. I've also been talking to lots of other photographers lately and they all praise about the joys of RAW shooting. And for those of you who don't know much about RAW, here is what I have gathered. RAW photos are basically just that, the RAW uncompressed file. Why is this good? When shooting JPEG files, the camera automatically compresses them and you end up losing valuable data that is lost for good. With RAW, you not only have that data, you have much more room to make adjustments and, have the ultimate control in deciding what the final product will look like. So tonight I made the jump to RAW......well not all RAW......I had my camera take a RAW and a Large/Fine JPEG photo at the same time......that way if I wasn't a fan of RAW I would still have the JPEG to use. Well goodbye JPEGs. I couldn't believe how cool editing the RAW photo was. From now on all my landscape photos are going to be taken in RAW. JPEG will still have to do though for sports and other times where I'll be taking tons of photos as the RAW photos are more than double the size of the JPEGs.....anyways here is the photo from tonight.....hope ya like it RAW

 

[Raf]

neat.. does photoshop have the ability to edit RAW photos or do you need to process them elsewhere first?

[brandon]

I downloaded a driver from the Canon website and when I opened the RAW photo in photoshop elements, the RAW editor popped up and away I went

[Raf]

ohh, so you use a different set of tools (provided by the canon driver) than the tools available in PS?

[brandon]

Yep......it's called Camera Raw 4.2......Most of the other companies that make DSLR cameras probably have RAW drivers as well

[evster]

Awesome shot Brandon!

 

I shoot RAW only now as well. It has enhanced so many of my photos, and downright saved other ones as well. I am also finding that whatever software you use you can eventually set up a collection of processing settings that you could quickly apply to a bunch of photos so you don't have to tediously tweak each one. Because of this I found I was just throwing the jpeg out, so i decided to save the space and buffer time and just shoot raw.