Photoshop, camera raw and black magic

Having just recently got a big enough CF card to allow it and managing to get a clear day, both in my diary and with the weather, I sallied forth into some local woods to capture what was left of the autumn colours in all their glory and that reputed of camera raw.

After stomping round a bit and taking a few dozen pictures in ‘auto’ mode, the adventurous side started to take over and the various knobs and buttons on the new camera became just too inviting.

So I start to twiddle and poke, snap and shoot to my heart’s content, with little glimpses at the results on the mini-screen at the back.

As may be expected some right horrors were noted and well as some black screens.

Not to worry, film is cheap on a digital camera!!

Eventually the light starts to fade and various unmentionable parts start to tighten up or wither at their will owing to the cold, giving me the idea that I really had enough to be going on with.

Back home again I do my usual thing and cut/paste in explorer into a new directory on a suitably clear drive.
So far no excitement.

Now at this point I have a mental aberration. Instead of doing my routine of many years and opening in ACDSee to flick through the product, I decide to open in this new fangled Adobe Bridge. Never could really find a use for it that I didn’t already have in abundance with ACDSee. Turned out to be a ‘good idea’ anyway later as I found that ACDSee did not like my raw files.

So there I am sat back watching the piccys opening up on the screen and something weird starts to happen. The ‘black’ ones open, then adjust themselves into some magic deep colours. Sort of along the lines of ‘ it must of fell of the shelf into by bag officer, I didn’t touch it – honest’ type of thing. It just happened before my eyes.

Got a nice bruise on the chin now from it falling onto the desk…

Is this supposed to happen in Bridge or has one of the household spooks got the bug for playing with pictures now as well??

Anyway onwards and upwards, I arm myself with my trusty Classroom in a Book and climb onto the high board to dive deeply into the mysteries of that section. Something glossed over before as I had no use for it.

Turned out that opening RAW files effectively seemed to be like opening a whole new secondary program inside Photoshop. What a wonderland I found. All the tools I usually use, close to hand and a few extra like being able to mess with the white balance. Load all the pictures in a set, work on one, then hit two buttons and – magic – they all reset themselves to perfect matches, seemingly no matter how far out they were to begin with.

My main thing is doing scenic and vintage engineering photography, strictly armature (Most end up in a.b.i.vintage-engineering,
a.b.p.scenic or tall-ships) mainly stitching the pictures together
into panoramic views of the subject. This being done in Panavue, OK, I know that the function is in PS.

To do this I need to have the pictures reasonably close in colour, and all the other things you can screw a picture with. This means that to do them takes time and a lot of it.

Sometimes I just have to accept that my abilities with PS and the various chants, runes, and the other acceptable aids to working are just not up to it and in spite of all the assistance received here they just are not going to match. Pure scrap.
Others are so washed out that I hesitate to keep them.

So here I am with something like 180 pictures, many taken with a view to stitching. From experience I am thinking that will keep me out of SWIMBO’s hair for at least a couple of days.

Three hours later I emerge with all done, dusted, saved as jpegs’ stitched and filed up. All with no apparent loss of colour, ‘vitality’ – never understood what that word meant with pictures before – or anything else.
That bruise on my chin magnified several time over.

So now I am looking at the hundreds of pictures remaining from my trip up north and wondering do I really need all the heart ache and struggle to try and do something with them as they are jpegs. Or perhaps there is some way of converting them into some sort of sham RAW file to be able to handle them that way???

Must admit that my little mind can not grasp why the conversion from RAW to jpeg is a one way street, be it in the camera or computer. I always understood that data is data and as such can be cleverly screwed about, just like politicians with truth.
So what am I missing?

Only one small problem finally emerges, when I try and distribute some of them I find that I have distribution problems, I missed the fact that the jpegs saved from the RAW files are still 10x the size of those I usually keep. Ho hum… sorry anyone reading who may have been affected…..

In my day we used to call it slide rule error.

Thanks for reading the ramblings of a person in shock, perhaps someone can answer some of the queries thrown up above and tell me if I have finally stumbled upon the key to the door of the Magic Circle of professional photographers?

Keith J Chesworth

www.unseenlondon.co.uk
www.blackpooltram.co.uk
www.amerseyferry.co.uk