Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Let me tell you!  True story. 

Thanks to QU, over the past 3 years or so, I have evolved from a mostly jpg based workflow, to a mostly raw workflow - although I capture both jpg and raw - but now mostly don't use the jpegs except for unusual situations. 

Anyway, about 6 weeks ago I set up my Rube Goldberg studio and did a session with 2 of my grandchildren.  Lasted less than 15 minutes - got about 75 shots - that's about how much patience 2 year olds have.  When I got finished, I was chagrined to find that I had not connected either of my auxiliary battery packs and feared that I would have many seriously underexposed pictures. because I tended to shoot in bursts once I got the children positioned. and was not sure if my flashes had adequate recycle time.

So I dumped the raw images into QU, didn't see any serious problems with any of the images and within a few days had a dozen or so frame-ready 8x10s, then moved on to other stuff.  Of course I made slight adjustments to exposure, balance etc - usual tweaks for each one - but none of them seemed out of normal range and I didn't have any thoughts that there were any exposure issues related to the session.

A couple of days ago - for reasons not worth getting into - I dumped the jpegs of that same session into QU.  I was shocked to see that exactly every third picture was almost completely black!  The raw versions of some of these are already in frames. The jpegs - even after exposure correction, fill light and all of the usual adjustments, would not make acceptable prints.

My raw exposure settings are just the QU defaults. I seldom have to do a refine of those.

So how good is the default raw processing?  Let me just use a gentle expletive and say Darn Darn good!
 :D

Mel W.  Columbia, Md.

Hi Mel,
Thank you for sharing that story, great stuff.
So who needs a whole bunch of sliders now?  ::)  ;D
Terry

I should add - although I guess it's obvious - that without the raw files and QU's ability to handle them - that is if I just had the jpegs - I would have been missing about a third of my pictures.

Not sure if you are aware of this, Mel, but maybe others are not.
There is a JPG carried inside the RAW image.
To extract it if you ever need/want it, just put the raw into the queue, right click on the preview image, and select Extract Embedded image.
It's a few pixels smaller than the Raw, but you have a good size JPG.

So no real need to shoot both and eat up the memory card.

Fred

Thanks Fred - I guess I knew that - but old habits die hard. When I first went to a digital camera, I would pull the flash card from the camera and throw it into some D-76 followed by hypo.  Couldn't figure out why I never got any good pictures. ;D