How often do you get out and take pictures? More importantly, how often do you process the images you take?

I went out today to start another short video on HD movie recording and capturing sound cleanly, and it was something I could have started on first thing this morning. Instead, I had to work up the motivation to do it - not because I didn't want to, but because of the processing!

When I teach photography, I teach people to get it right in camera. I have a real issue with sloppy shooting corrected in post-processing - it breeds digital artists rather than photographers. While there's space for both, it's the digital artists that call themselves photographers that really get to me. Anyway, that aside, the processing is the thing I dislike about photography. I sit in front of a computer all day and the last thing I want to do is process images. Sometimes I enjoy it, but most of the time it's just a dull chore I have to do. Now, it's never stopped me taking pictures (and it never will because I love doing that too much!), but it has made me procrastinate from time to time.

Then again, processing other people's images is actually quite fun. You get to see the way they look at the world and how they go about taking their images. Could it be that old chestnut 'familiarity'? 

The other side to this is that usually, once I've taken pictures, I want to see them ASAP on the computer and get them processed! I know, it makes no real sense. I guess it's a dread thing - taking pictures is going to lock me into sitting behind the computer and processing images, and that's something I'd rather do when I want instead of because I have to. As it is, when I get round to processing images, I'm incredibly ruthless with those I do adjust. If I don't like the image immediately, or don't see the 'value' (in whatever sense) of it, it doesn't get touched.

The thing is, the advent of digital video means it's even worse - not only is it processing behind a computer, but it takes a LOT longer! In fact, just now I've edited together some footage to make it work as a sequence, and in doing a split screen I've had to wait for 30minutes for the video to render before I can see the result... and this is on a very powerful Mac Pro with fast separate scratch disks for data handling!

So, does it affect you too? Do you enjoy processing or would you rather you didn't have to? If you, like me, don't enjoy processing, how do you get around it? Do you shoot and then leave the images on a hard drive for a week and then come back to them 'fresh'? It's something I might try when I don't have time pressures to get images out. If it's not that, nthen how do you keep yourslf motivated to process your pictures? 

Hit up the comments and tell me how it works for you....

A few weeks back I wrote a post about RAW and JPEG. In it, I told a little story about baking a cake and I let on the fact that I was a complete chocoholic. Well, for those that found that post interesting, this may tick a few boxes too.

A couple of days ago, one of the blog readers, Steve, dropped me an email with two small histograms attached. They were from the same image but one was the RAW version of the file and the other was the JPEG. Now at first thought, you may expect the histograms to look the same. But they don't. Similar yes, but the differences are obvious - and they show the advantage of a RAW file over a JPEG. 

 On the left is the histogram from the JPEG file, on the right is the histogram from the RAW file. Can you spot the difference? 

Well, it's quite obvious if you look at the edge of the trace lines - the RAW file histogram has a smoother outline with fewer sharp peaks and troughs. The question is... why? 

Well, it's quite simple really, and it's to do with bit depth. Bit depth defines how many different, or unique, colours an image can contain. A JPEG file can only be 8bit wherease a RAW file from the camera used to produce this image (an EOS-1D Mark III) is 14bit. While 8bit provides 16.7million unique colours, 14bit provides 4.3trillion unique colours.

It's this extra colour data and the corresponding smoother tonal gradation between each tone that makes the histogram smoother. 

Does this mean that RAW is better? Well, if you're planning on trying to really maximise the ability of your camera to capture data so you can have the most data to work with afterwards, then yes, RAW is better. However, you need to ask the question of whether you will notice the difference in the final image. In many cases, it's unlikely you would, but you can never tell beforehand what the final use of an image will be so my view is to capture as much as possible and throw data away rather than capture less and be unable to create it. 

As an addition to this, people often ask about printing and the fact that surely you need an 8bit file. Well, that used to be the case, but modern printers are so good now, especially the Canon PIXMA range, that they can deal with, and make use of, a 16bit file. This means prints look better, colours are more accurate and there is less chance of tonal stepping where gaps emerge between discrete colours because of extreme image processing. 

There have been many things written and told about RAW and JPEG and there is a general mis-understanding among some people about the difference between the two formats and what they should be shooting. However, there is no need as it can be easily explained using a simple analogy - that of baking a cake.

Imagine you are going to throw a party for some friends and you want to provide a cake for the end of the meal. You head to your supermarket of choice and you have two purchasing options:

1. Death by chocolate double chococlate heaven delight cake (yes, I'm a chocoholic!) ready made in a pack and a small tub or hundreds 'n' thousands to sprinkle on top

2.  Flour, eggs, sugar, chocolate, and all the other ingredients that go into a cake. 

Now, depending on your purchasing choice, when you get home you have to do one of two things - take the readymade cake out of the pack and add some sprinkles, or bake a cake from scratch. 

In this analogy, JPEG is the ready made cake - for a lot of situations it will be fine, it will taste good, look good and be generally acceptable. However, if you wish to really spoil your guests, as the ambassador did at his reception (UK audience joke! - apologies to non-UK readers), then your ready made cake looks a bit limp and cheap. Instead, you could custom make your cake from all the RAW ingredients and really put some of yourself into it - and by that I don't mean chopped off ends of fingers! This, in case you didn't guess, is your RAW file. You can still add the sprinkles at the end of that, but assuming you know how to bake a cake, you can end up with a much more personal (and hopefully better) result becasue you've put your creative spin on it. 

Thought of like that, the RAW/JPEG decision is easier to make - if you want to spend time baking back home and you really want to extract the most you possibly can from the file to get the very best result, shoot RAW. If you're not sure about you 'baking' skills or you are shooting for something that doesn't need the most detail possible, JPEG will be fine - you can after all still add a little sprinkle to it if you want. 

There is a third way - the RAW+JPEG option. This really is having your cake and eating it.... you can hve all the ease of preparation of the JPEG file, but can still go back to a RAW file should you decide that you want to be a little more creative with it later. It come with a warning though - just as buying both a ready made cake and the RAW ingredients will eat up your resources (money and basket space) so shooting RAW and JPEG will consume your memory card space and hard drive space.