Nill Toulme
New member
I shoot high school sports, and I shoot RAW. If I didn't, I'm not sure how I'd get along, as I'm frequently shooting in difficult lighting conditions, and I also tend to make a lot of dumb mistakes where a jpg would be toast but RAW saves my bacon. (Hmmm, sounds like breakfast...)
Many people seem to think that while RAW may be fine when you're intending to do a lot of post-processing work on just a few shots, it's just not practical when you have a LOT of shots to process, such as from a sporting event. But that's simply not true. It's not too hard or too time-consuming to shoot RAW unless perhaps you have to upload immediately to meet a publication deadline or you're selling on-site and don't have the time to do anything other than let your customers see exactly what comes out of the camera. Otherwise, assuming you're even going to go to the trouble to crop and level your shots (and if you're not, why are you bothering to shoot at all?), then you can do it, and in my opinion and experience, do it better, in RAW.
This time of year I shoot several thousand RAW frames a week. My workflow is very quick and straightforward (or I would go nuts and my wife would shoot me... she's pretty close to it already). I'll typically shoot 500-1500 RAW frames per game, depending on this that and the other.
I dump to the computer using a fast Lexar card reader and Breeze Downloader Pro. That's a big leg up right from the start. To see why, see this link.
Then I cull the shoot down to keepers, or maybe keepers, very quickly with a full screen sharpened view using BreezeBrowser Pro. For details on how I do that, go to this link.
Then I convert the keepers using Capture One. A few more usually find their way to the trash bin at this stage. In the conversion I will crop, rotate if necessary to level the horizon, and adjust the levels. I shoot auto WB and it is extremely rare for me to do any color correction at this stage — or any other for that matter. Default saturation, default sharpening, and only the very slight noise reduction that Capture One applies by default. In other words, all I'm really doing is crop, maybe rotate, and levels. That's it. (But note that an easy trick at this stage for masking a LOT of high ISO noise in night game shots is to raise the black point enough to block up the shadows and backgrounds.)
Then I feed the converted keepers to BreezeBrowser Pro again to produce my html web gallery. In doing so it applies some default USM to generate the jpg's, and of course converts them to sRGB. That's it... I'm done. Dump the new gallery to my web server, add a link to it from the appropriate index page, and go to bed.
From 1000+ frames shot to 150 chosen, cropped, adjusted, converted and up on the web... usually about an hour and a half if I keep my concentration up, maybe two hours if I woolgather.
For print orders I use Qimage. The only times I open Photoshop any more are very occasionally to apply NR (Noiseware, and that only for some prints larger than 4x6), and even less frequently, some cosmetological or other retouching.
Strictly from the standpoint of the RAW conversion part, the key to this is Capture One. Once I got used to its somewhat non-standard interface, it's allowed me to process RAW images at least as fast as I could process jpg's in Photoshop — probably faster.
For further reading, Don Cohen has a very nice article about RAW workflow here.
Nill
~~
www.toulmephoto.com
Many people seem to think that while RAW may be fine when you're intending to do a lot of post-processing work on just a few shots, it's just not practical when you have a LOT of shots to process, such as from a sporting event. But that's simply not true. It's not too hard or too time-consuming to shoot RAW unless perhaps you have to upload immediately to meet a publication deadline or you're selling on-site and don't have the time to do anything other than let your customers see exactly what comes out of the camera. Otherwise, assuming you're even going to go to the trouble to crop and level your shots (and if you're not, why are you bothering to shoot at all?), then you can do it, and in my opinion and experience, do it better, in RAW.
This time of year I shoot several thousand RAW frames a week. My workflow is very quick and straightforward (or I would go nuts and my wife would shoot me... she's pretty close to it already). I'll typically shoot 500-1500 RAW frames per game, depending on this that and the other.
I dump to the computer using a fast Lexar card reader and Breeze Downloader Pro. That's a big leg up right from the start. To see why, see this link.
Then I cull the shoot down to keepers, or maybe keepers, very quickly with a full screen sharpened view using BreezeBrowser Pro. For details on how I do that, go to this link.
Then I convert the keepers using Capture One. A few more usually find their way to the trash bin at this stage. In the conversion I will crop, rotate if necessary to level the horizon, and adjust the levels. I shoot auto WB and it is extremely rare for me to do any color correction at this stage — or any other for that matter. Default saturation, default sharpening, and only the very slight noise reduction that Capture One applies by default. In other words, all I'm really doing is crop, maybe rotate, and levels. That's it. (But note that an easy trick at this stage for masking a LOT of high ISO noise in night game shots is to raise the black point enough to block up the shadows and backgrounds.)
[UPDATE: Since getting the 1D Mark IV I have been forced to update to Capture One v5.1. It's absolutely terrific. The Highlight and Shadow adjustment sliders are amazing, and the Clarity adjustment is pretty wonderful too. Took a bit of getting used to the new interface, but not as much as I feared, and I really like it better now. Highly recommended.]
[FURTHER UPDATE: As much as I like many things in C1 v5.1, including its workflow, I have not been happy with what its noise reduction does to high ISO Mark IV images. The default approach is extremely aggressive, losing massive amounts of detail, and I find it very difficult to control and to get acceptable results. Mind you, I'm talking about ISO 5000 and up, and very difficult images like underexposed shots of dark skinned players. But all the same, I have not been pleased with it.
Enter Adobe Camera Raw v6.1 beta. This is the same RAW conversion technology found in the Lightroom3 beta. It's simply amazing what it does with these images. I'm going to have to make some adjustments in the workflow, at least for very high ISO images. I might even have to learn to use Lightroom.]
[FURTHER UPDATE: As much as I like many things in C1 v5.1, including its workflow, I have not been happy with what its noise reduction does to high ISO Mark IV images. The default approach is extremely aggressive, losing massive amounts of detail, and I find it very difficult to control and to get acceptable results. Mind you, I'm talking about ISO 5000 and up, and very difficult images like underexposed shots of dark skinned players. But all the same, I have not been pleased with it.
Enter Adobe Camera Raw v6.1 beta. This is the same RAW conversion technology found in the Lightroom3 beta. It's simply amazing what it does with these images. I'm going to have to make some adjustments in the workflow, at least for very high ISO images. I might even have to learn to use Lightroom.]
Then I feed the converted keepers to BreezeBrowser Pro again to produce my html web gallery. In doing so it applies some default USM to generate the jpg's, and of course converts them to sRGB. That's it... I'm done. Dump the new gallery to my web server, add a link to it from the appropriate index page, and go to bed.
From 1000+ frames shot to 150 chosen, cropped, adjusted, converted and up on the web... usually about an hour and a half if I keep my concentration up, maybe two hours if I woolgather.
For print orders I use Qimage. The only times I open Photoshop any more are very occasionally to apply NR (Noiseware, and that only for some prints larger than 4x6), and even less frequently, some cosmetological or other retouching.
Strictly from the standpoint of the RAW conversion part, the key to this is Capture One. Once I got used to its somewhat non-standard interface, it's allowed me to process RAW images at least as fast as I could process jpg's in Photoshop — probably faster.
For further reading, Don Cohen has a very nice article about RAW workflow here.
Nill
~~
www.toulmephoto.com
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