Information about 12mp, RAW and RAW conversion.

04/22/2007 05:04:35 AM · #1

I'm going out shooting today and have never really shot in RAW or even used to 12mp modes on my camera, which are normal and fine.

I've recen tly aquired 2gb of memory so I might try them out today. Only problem is I can't find the disk that came with my S7000 with the RAW conversion software on it and non of none which I could use. Secondly I've read a couple of reviews saying to turn on soft focus when using these modes as the normal setting is a little sharp.

I have no idea what I'm doing :( Any tips about these things or info on a RAW converter I can use?

04/22/2007 05:19:39 AM · #2

According to DPC, the S7000 is 6.3MP. If you are shooting at 12MP, then the camera must be resampling the images. It's better to do this your self on the computer.

Do you have Photoshop? It comes with a good RAW converter. Otherwise you could download RawShooter Essentials 2006.

04/22/2007 05:29:03 AM · #3

Originally posted by Raziel:

Yeah it's using the CCD sensor to kind of blow up the image in camera, so it always kind of struck me as something only to be used if you intend on printing large copies of the photograph.

As for RAW converters well for some reason I took some RAW images yesterday and photoshop opened them as a weird kind of TV static mess. There was no image but all this grey and black. I did try one raw converter that came with my CF card but that couldn't recognise the files.

ALso when shooting in RAW my camera saves them as RAF, which I just renamed to RAW and it set them to open with PS.

04/22/2007 05:36:25 AM · #4

What version of Photoshop do you have? You should update the Adobe Camera RAW plug-in.

04/22/2007 05:42:39 AM · #5

I'll give that a go, it's just I've been told Fujifilm use their own RAW compression which requires the program they give you on the disk that comes with the camera to use it.

EDIT - The software is downloadable from their site so I'll give that a go, it worked like in the week I got my camera when I was testing things out.

Anyways,m so what differences will I notice with RAW?

Message edited by author 2007-04-22 05:44:23.

04/22/2007 05:56:03 AM · #6

RAW gives you more flexibility in post processing. You can set the while balance, contrast, saturation and more in the RAW converter. With JPEG you have to set them before you take a photo. RAW is also a 12-bit format (JPEG is 8-bit), which means you get more quantisation levels. The drawback to RAW is that it takes up for space. On my Nikon I only shoot RAW.

04/22/2007 06:04:32 AM · #7

Ok so it definitely sounds worth giving it a go.

So I found a program called s7RAW which is apparently better than the fuji software and now I can read the RAF files that come off my camera and save them as PSD. From pshop though I cna then only save them as Tiff or RAW. How do I get the eventual product to JPG?