Raw file question

andiamo

What setting do I need to preserve the maximum range of colors. The manuals are very opaque when it comes to documenting the behavior of raw files. I recently purchased my first digital camera, a D300. It has the capability of storing raw files with a bit depth of 14. It then vaguely talks about storing the files expressed as RGB or Adobe. I understand the charecterstics of each, but don't understand why I need to make that decision in the camera.

Photoshop insists on converting the files to dng before converting to the Photoshop format and I end up with 3 15 or more megabyte files and no idea what I did to the color range on each conversion.

Any help will be appreciated.

BinaryFx

andiamo wrote:

What setting do I need to preserve the maximum range of colors.

Hi andiamo, it will depend on the converter, for Adobe, the widest gamut *output* space available in the raw converter is ProPhoto RGB (ACR/ALR uses a linear version of this space internally, but does not output this space). In other converters, one can choose other wide gamut options or the developer may have chosen a different wide gamut space.

The manuals are very opaque when it comes to documenting the behavior of raw files. I recently purchased my first digital camera, a D300. It has the capability of storing raw files with a bit depth of 14. It then vaguely talks about storing the files expressed as RGB or Adobe. I understand the charecterstics of each, but don't understand why I need to make that decision in the camera.

This is for JPEG rendering, so can probably choose to shoot either JPEG, raw or raw+JPEG.

The raw image does not have a standard colour space until processed/rendered by a converter (either in-camera for JPEG or on the computer for raw camera data). The raw data is simply intensity levels, grayscale data, from which colour will be interpolated, before it is saved from this linear state to a gamma corrected colour space such as ProPhoto or Adobe RGB.


Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

arodney

andiamo wrote:

Any help will be appreciated.

I'd start here:

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/prophotographer/pdfs/pscs3_renderprint.pdf

andiamo

Thank you both for the input. It is a big help to me.

I don't understand why the various players make this so complicated; I would have expected all processing software to maintain maximum color depth and coerce it to whatever is needed when it is output to a screen, printer or email ...