Digital BW, The Print

> From: Anthony G. Atkielski [mailto:anthony@...]
>
> What about shooting raw?  If the raw file holds the original signals off
> the sensor (?) with their linear characteristic, that would give you a
> lot of headroom to retain highlight and shadow, although there would be
> less contrast.  With sufficient manipulation, you could have both,
> albeit not in the same area of the image.  I presume that most of the
> problem with blown highlights or blocked shadows in digicam photos
> arises from software manipulation of the raw image right in side the
> camera--to make an image "pop," you'll naturally apply something like an
> S-curve to a linear signal so that the midtones stand out ...
> sacrificing the highlights and shadows.  But if you can get the image
> before that manipulation is performed, you should be able to recover a
> lot.

That's indeed what I do. But even in raw mode, there's a hard ceiling on the
data, albeit a somewhat higher ceiling. It's surprising how often I
encounter scenes where the highlight to average ratio is quite large, such
as the bright spots on leaves. If I wanted to be very careful about each
shot, I'd use the histogram to tell if I was clipping stuff, and then
reshoot if necessary, but that's not my shooting style.

Fortunately, the Canon 10D has a pretty amazing S/N ratio at ISO 100.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...