Photog BS Arena

hmm

 

I was talking about merging 6 - 80 meg RAW files at one time into an HDR file.

 

I would expect your camera will have several "sizes" of RAW files you can shoot. Start with the lowest, if that'll get you to try it out.

 

If you've never used a RAW file in Lightroom or Photoshop you don't know what you're missing.

 

I won't see a body which can shoot that large of a file until the kids are out of college, or I find a new line of work.

I can imagine that would slow down the computer.

 

I have some from someone else, but when I try to open them in CS6, it says "it is not the right kind of document"

 

I was watching some pros demo Lightroom and couldn't get over how powerful it is. I figured it was, but had not watched anyone do it. It almost feels like (dare I say) cheating. But, then I think of the days of film where there was plenty of magic going on in the darkroom to alter/modify the resulting image, and I almost get over it.

 

You have the CS6 that came on a disk right and not the cloud based one?

 

cloud. before it made me download a plugin and i could open them but not anymore?

 

Is this that Adobe Creative Cloud thing?

 

I don't know anything about the cloud based one. Mine is all local on the laptop. I did have to download a updated Adobe camera Raw last year to use the raw files off the D800. May be something to do with something they changed in that plugin you downloaded. Could be the plugin causing it.

 

I think that's what it's called now

 

Not stupid. Especially because the older gear becomes the more new media won't be compatible. For your Nikon see the very bottom of http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d5200/spec.htm With the right card you can hit 128GB. Your Canon is a little older though, and does not support the SDXC format, it only goes up to SDHC which is limited to 32GB; see https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/details/cameras/support-dslr/eos-rebel-t1i

The other factor is the card speed rating. Usually not an issue if you buy 'quality' brands, but make sure it's at least 6x or higher, and preferably 10x or higher. Speed rating will impact the ability to record video, how fast/many your frame buffer fills up during continuous shooting, and of course how fast you can access the card. Most cameras are (still) only USB2, so pulling the card out and putting it in a USB3 reader will offload faster.

The reason your trail cams are limited likely has to do with the age and amount of memory they can address, the file system required for formatting the card, and the maximum volume/file size for said file system (in combination with camera design, as in how big a chunk it splits videos into, if any).

Meh. I started out raw only, then went to raw+jpg, and then mostly jpg and raw when I thought I had an 'art' shot I might want to really work with exposure on or enlarge or whatever. Raw just eats up too much space if you shoot a lot, and it's not always needed. Plus there's the extra processing time vs just setting your camera to produce the result you want anyway. And yet for some reason I'm still shooting Adobe RGB instead of sRGB... BTW jake, just so you know there is no sharpening (or any other camera settings like contrast or saturation) applied to a raw file (in theory) - that stuff only happens when a) you set the camera to jpg or b) you open the raw file in any kind of editor or processor in which case it usually defaults to camera settings but you can tweak that.

Newer cameras are doing that, but... well it's basically a sensor crop, and I'd rather have a 100% pixel jpg than a 50% pixel raw. I don't remember when Canon started doing it. Jake's D5200 apparently doesn't. My 20D didn't, my 70D does. The file size savings aren't that great either - for mine, regular 20mp/24MB, medium 11mp/19MB, small 5mp/13MB. My 20D was 8mp/8MB. BTW, speaking of card sizes I used a pair of 1GB cards on my 20D and rarely filled both on a 2 week vacation. Went with two 32GB cards for my 70D, and have yet to fill one of them. But that's mostly because stick with jpg 80% of the time. In fact this last trip I accidentally left raw on and was shocked when I noticed I'd dropped below 999 remaining for the first time. Video can also start eating up space quick, but I don't do a lot of that.

Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) is a plugin that updates independently of Photoshop. Camera support is one of the things that updates. Unfortunately, while ACR is independent of Photoshop, it's still version limited which means older versions of Photoshop don't support newer versions of ACR. In fact, my version (CS5) doesn't support the version of ACR that was introduced to support my 70D. Thus I can't work with my new raw files except for in DPP (Canon's software). I got to be pretty good with ACR and it was light years beyond DPP. The current DPP is an improvement, but in terms of use it still sucks compared to even the old ACR - and ACR has gotten much better as well. I haven't done any real editing/processing for a while now, but I did look into a few options to upgrade. Lightroom was ok, but didn't allow for area specific edits, just global. Wasn't too impressed with the interface either. But it's been updated since then, and majorly improved from what I heard. There's also DxO and Perfectly Clear. I tried DxO, which I was interested in because of their extensive lens correction profiles. But that was pretty much the best thing they had going for them and I ended up not committing to purchase. Perfectly Clear wasn't a thing yet when I last looked, so no direct experience with that. I keep meaning to bite the bullet and get on Creative Cloud with the newest Photoshop, but haven't done it yet.

 

so the size of the picture is the determinant of the pictures file size correct? all the photos last weekend were 4752x3168 but the size of the file varies?

 

It can vary by how much info is in the photo. It can also vary on the JPEG end by quality of final photo.

 

What he said. Some of the numbers I listed above are specs from the manual, some are eyeball averages from looking at a folder. My 70D is a 24mp camera, and I've got raw files from last trip ranging from 20MB to 30MB. On my 20D, an 8mp camera, they range from 6-10MB. What's in the picture (number of colors, range of light to dark) is what influences that variation.

 

Saw a post about The Colorado Photography Learning Group, which led me to MeetUp, and then saw a handful of Denver-area photography groups there. Anyone participate with, or a member in, a group and have recommendations (positive or negative)?

 

@aero3685 A couple macro photography links for the first post:

Macrophotography by LordV aka Brian Valentine.
Photographing dew drop refractions by Brian Valentine.
Extreme Macro page - just about anything you would need to know.
Jaw-dropping high magnification macro bug photography, and gear images

 

Late to game but RAW is like having the blue prints as well as the photo, other's file types don't have this detail. Thus with editing software, RAW unlocks it full potential.

 

I'm an editor for a large radio-controlled airplane website; a majority of my duties is product photography. I also own a drone aerial photography business that's been operating since 2009.