Adjustment is necessary as a tool

I quoted Ansel Adams quite a few times, here I have to quote him again. Negative is the original ingredient, the material to make a nice meal for the eye. We do not eat raw meat, raw vegetable because these are tasteless even though it is natural, or put it negatively RAW.

Save for the future is the RAW format of digital photography, this is the ingredient for a photograph, it is not and should not be the end result for various reasons. The RAW converter in software is only readiable by the software written for that special purpose of reading the RAW file, however, if in 20 years, the camera company no longer exists, there is no software to read the RAW files, we who save the files in RAW format will have our entire photo library rendered useless unless we can find someone who knows how to write such a program. This happened before in some computer games, e.g. Atari, who can guarantee that such will not happen again!

To be safe, better cook the ingredients and save it is a very very common format i.e. jpg, because this format is so common, there will still be some software able to open it. It happened to me before when I bought a Leica D-Lux 4 point and shoot camera, the RAW format was not recognized until 6 months later, this gave me the cold shower to using this camera for anything serious.

Now as expected, today to have to show you the RAW and cooked picture.

Guess what, this is original out of the camera picture of my friend (thanks!) who was brave enough to go to Tokyo after the March earth quake. A simple picture of a deserted train station with no body. My friend was not very happy about the picture, but does not know why.

I identified the adjustments needed to cook the picture, and the end result:

Now you can see better highlight without damaging the shadow details, there is more contrast. This is what I have done:

- increase the contrast a bit, that will recreate the tonality which was lacking in the original picture, human eyes can differentiate a much wider exposure latitude vs camera, so it is always (not 100%, but more like 90%) better to increase the contrast slightly.

- reduce the exposure by about 1 stop. The original exposure is overexposed because the foreground is mostly dark in colour, the camera meter only treated it as medium grey, therefore the picture was overexposure. See how the ground was grey in the first picture vs the darker grey in the second picture.

- As a result of overexposure, the far sky is washed out (I mentioned this before, try to get as much detail of the sky as possible), I use the software to clip the highlight and extracted details.

- Now I hope you can agree with me that the "cooked" picture is better tasting than the RAW picture.

- As a final touch, the red light which was not so apparent in the original picture is now noticeable, recreating the mood of Japan is not going any where and brought the whole picture to have a bit of meaning.

Everything is there in the ingredient, go "cook" it.