Sunday, May 06, 2007

San Juan Bautista Mission II


For larger image click on picture.

On Friday, after one more wasted trip to to San Jose on job search (you don't want to be looking for work at 59), I stopped by San Juan Bautista Mission. It is both a state museum center with a number of buildings beautifully restored to mid-18th century and an active parish. I spent a couple hours in meditation and shooting. My soul was refreshed.

This shot, and those in the previous post, were shot in RAW. Frankly, for most of my work, JPEG is just fine. RAW is a huge nuisance whose increased flexibility is not worth the effort involved. But having said that, if you are willing to plug away at an image, I have to say you do get a better picture.

The first issue I encountered was the fact that the onboard Canon software over-saturates pictures. (I learned this from my friend Manu at San Francisco Daily Photo.) When you open a RAW from Canon, that fact becomes pretty clear when you compare the RAW image to JPEG from the same exposure.

In the Bridge RAW viewer I reduced the saturatiom in most images and made whatever other adjustments appeared necessary. I then converted the RAW to an editable format ( I prefer TIF) and saved. I then moved on the Lightroom which makes 90% of the workflow that I used to do in PS ever so much easier. If necessary, I move on the PS for whatever fine detail work is needed.
Phew! That's a lot of stuff! Cool, but worth it?

I need to know how to do this stuff for the pictures that call for it, stange lighting and the like. But for the other 90% of occasions, I see no reason to go through this. JPEG is fine.

2 comments:

WJWilson said...

Very nice. Maybe I'll have to try to check this out this coming weekend.

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear that your meditation refreshed your soul. Are you getting bored with not working? Too much time to take pictures? :-)

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