RAW Image Edited in Darktable |
One of the improvements I made a while ago was shooting everything in the camera's RAW format. I have noticed that there are some pretty big drawbacks to shooting in RAW. Namely, it takes much more memory, it takes longer to edit, and the camera takes longer to process and save the images to my SD card. With all these drawbacks, I decided to do an experiment to convince myself that shooting in RAW is worth the extra effort.
Yesterday I went on a hike and took some pictures of the stream we were hiking along. I took all my pictures in both RAW and JPG.
To begin this experiment, I opened both my JPG and RAW photos in Picasa and exported them both to JPG as seen below:
This is the original JPG image |
This is the RAW image exported in Picasa |
The next step I took was editing the photo in my favorite RAW editor, Darktable. I made the changes until I was satisfied then saved the changes I made so that I could apply the same changes to the JPG image.
RAW Image Edited in Darktable
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JPG image edited in Darktable using the same settings that were made to the RAW image |
To give the JPG more credit though, using the exact same settings is not exactly fair. The JPG and RAW images ARE different and should be treated as such. Because of this, I went back to Darktable and specifically edited just the JPG to see if I could make the changes to get it to look like the edited RAW image. Here is what I came up with:
JPG edited in Darktable to mimic the results of the RAW image |
Conclusion:
Even though shooting in RAW takes more time and resources (hard drive space), I would say it is definitely worth it if you want better quality in your photos.
Darktable or Darkroom? :)
ReplyDeleteThanks Sergei for catching that. Don't know why I keep calling it Darkroom. I went ahead and changed it to Darktable.
ReplyDeleteThe 3rd one is pretty cool. It almost has the makings of an HDR sort of look.
ReplyDelete