Raw insanity

Raw digital camera formats were created unique to each manufacturer to drive highly technical photographers insane trying to find raw 'development' nirvana. About every six months I select a couple of my recent photographs and run them through all the available raw processor's I can get demo's for or own. I then 'pixel peep' the results which means examining the results in great detail at very large blow-ups, often to the point where one can see the pixels.

Since each of these raw developers are software applications they have vastly different ideas from their engineer creators as to how any of us want to process our photo's. Then each engineer or software team has their own idea's as to what we understand and how they can deliver controls which will help us get the optimal results.

I can have two strategies for running each program's adjustments. I can take the programs 'default' settings or I can try to make each program produce an optimal result by adjusting the numerous and not always named the same thing controls.

I am then left with multiple 'versions' of the same image. They are very hard to compare, because despite my best attempts to make them at least have the same level of brightness, contrast and dynamic range they don't match. And then there is the process of 'comparing'. Absolutely the best software for doing comparing is for Windows, the FastStone image viewer which allows one to compare up to 4 photo's. Your screen is split into even sections for each photo and then you can scroll around and blow up the photo's, each action is synced in each window, so you are always looking at the same thing in each of 4 different windows. FastStone is only one of two software packages I have found, Windows, Mac or Linux that does this with up to 4 photo's. The other is also Windows based and is a asset management system called IdImager.

Back to the comparison strategies. There are arguments for either of them depending upon what kind of photographer you are. If you take 100's of shots at a time, which digital cameras really encourage, then doing the comparisons using 'default' settings might be a good strategy. However if you either take a few photo's or are very good at pruning your 100's into a few, then trying for 'optimal' results might be a good comparison approach. I do both, of course, since I can't make my mind up :)

If you are looking for some 'winner' from me you are not going to get it. I find a different winner each time I do the tests and sometimes a different winner with each photo. So maybe it doesn't really matter. But this is exactly the kind of endless technical manipulation inside a GUI, which changes parameters sometimes understandably and sometimes not, but always with noticeable results, that is obsessive but ultimately leads to madness.

Oh well, go to go now and check out the latest 'gui' for dcraw....