MtnMan Loc: ID

Your probably right. I should have said over 95% shoot jpeg.

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

I love my 800e for a number of reasons. First is Mpx. I have a print hanging in a living room that is 2 x 1.4 meters, and the detail up close is amazing. It's one thing to see a tiny portion of an image at 100% on a monitor, another to see it on a print blown up to the size of four large movie posters.

Then there is the dynamic range. You might not notice anything normally, but as soon as you start exposing for highlights in high contrast situations and then lifting shadows its unbelievable. I work with both Canon 5D3 and Nikon 800e, and I did some comparisons of shadow noise at low ISOs. The Nikon absolutely murders the Canon.

Yes, when the buffer fills you have to go get a coffee and wait. There is a huge amount of data being transferred and it takes time. It's not the camera for sports, but for everything else, oh boy...

I'm attaching three frames that were 3 stops underexposed in order not to blow the highlights. The shadows are absolutely clean when pulled up.

Sorry to hijack this thread...

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russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

In retrospect (by a couple of months), when I examined my own work flow, and I'm a professional who, I reported to myself, uses Photoshop exclusively, I actually don't use Photoshop exclusively because--ta da!--I use some third -party plug-ins and Actions. For example, I use Redfield's Fractalius, many Actions from PanosFX, and several plugins from Topaz, and even onOne's Perfect Suite. So even I, who claim to use Photoshop exclusively at this point, don't.

However, all of the Actions and plugins I use are accessed via a mouse click (or keyboard shortcut that I have created) from within Photoshop. I won't use them at this point if I can't get to them from within Photoshop.

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

Every company has a "history of stopping to offer updates to a given release at some time," not just Adobe. Ford doesn't support the Model T anymore.

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

That's definitely not true, though, if you set your camera to shoot pictures in RAW files only. A great supermajority of the professional photographers in the three camera clubs that I belong to here use RAW only. One guy that has a downtown San Diego gallery (with some absolutely beautiful pictures!) said that he shoots RAW files only so that when he gets back to the office he's not prejudiced in seeing some JPG produced by some camera manufacturer's software programmers.

It was his statement, "I want the flattest of the flat RAW files" that caused me to pause. When I asked what he meant, he said that RAW files are different depending on which manufacturer they come from. After visiting him at his office to see proof of his statement, well, he offered proof, and I could see what was going on.

He converts all of his CR2 RAW files to Adobe DNG because they are not only smaller, but they are flatter, too. When I did my own test back at my office, yes, indeed, the DNG RAW files were much flatter than my own camera's CR2 files.

That was when I started some additional exploration and discovered that my camera's Picture Style settings (Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, Monochrome) affected what kind of CR2 RAW file was created.

I can set Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation, and Color Tone for each Picture Style, and they definitely affect the quality of the RAW file, so much so that I complained to Adobe because my pictures were coming into ACR and Photoshop with so much noise that some were virtually unusable.

The Adobe technician took over my computer and didn't find anything abnormal with Photoshop. He suggested I look at my camera's RAW settings. Yep. That was the problem. I had set the Sharpness on all of my Picture Styles to maximum sharpness. When I returned the settings to their default settings, all of the RAW files were fine again.

A couple of times of setting them to maximum sharpness and back to default proved definitively that the RAW files were affected by the camera's settings. Which, of course, is only logical. Otherwise, the camera's settings would be grayed out or otherwise wouldn't work if one was shooting RAW files only. But they do work, and they do affect the RAW file.

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

I don't see how the exit bar is too high. Any pictures that you have modified in Photoshop remain modified and you can open them in PaintShop Pro, Photo-Paint, GIMP, ACDsee, etc., so I'm not seeing an exit bar at all.

Additionally, the updates don't stop the minute you stop paying. If you pay monthly, then you have 30 days before updates stop. If you pay annually, then you have 90 days before the updates stop.

I don't know how you're trying to connect with Adobe, but you should try their online chat. It's awesome. For example, at 1:00 p.m. today (height of business hours) I was trying to install my Photoshop and Lightroom subscription software on a new Windows 8 computer. Couldn't get it to work. I know it was my fault for not yet being well-versed in Windows 8, but I needed Photoshop on a Windows 8 computer. I logged on to adobe.com, went to online chat, and connected within technical support in about 45 seconds. He took over my computer, spent about five minutes cleaning up all the mess I had made, and then downloaded and installed CC app, Photoshop, and Lightroom. Everything went smoothly and works perfectly.

If you try to phone them, well, no one has phone support anymore. There's a reason for that. They can only work with one person via phone. With online support, they can work with many people simultaneously, even "seeing" what problems are occurring, what software you have installed that could be conflicting, etc., providing a much better software support experience.

snoopzspinlab

I use Corel myself and found it easier to deal with than PS...it's a very powerful editor with the usual GUI similar to PS...there are a few things PS does that Corel does like the Liqufy feature but over al it's pretty much the same in my opinion only cheaper than PS...

kymarto Loc: Portland OR and Milan Italy

Basically everything. Lightroom is for cataloging and organizing images, and then for some adjustments to the raw file before exporting. That's it.

First, let me say that I can understand for wedding photogs and others who shoot and need to batch huge numbers of photos, and organize those photos, LR is probably great. But I, like you, generally work on a small number of images culled from what I shoot. I also do a lot of HDR work, and because of the difficulties of tonemapping, I will usually end up with multiple versions of a single image that need to be masked and/or blended together.

My workflow goes something like this: go through a shoot and pick out the images I decide to work on. Often I run these all through DxO Optics Pro and output dng files for the corrections. These (or the original raws) go into ACR one by one, where I make some preliminary adjustments to get them in the ballpark. These I then open in PS as 16 bit files, where I proceed to do all the real work. For instance, the curves control in LR and ACR suck--they are small, don't show clipping, don't have black, grey, white point adjustments, etc. I am also a big fan of the shadows and highlights adjustment in PS--much more flexible than the single sliders in LR.

Then we have clone tools galore in PS, so I clean up flare and other things in the frame (like cigarette butts floating in the water in the Forbidden City moat in Beijing).

I usually do exposure brackets, so sometimes I will mask in parts of other exposures--for instance a sky. I then do a lot of burning and dodging to get tonality across the frame the way I want it. I also sometimes select individual chroma ranges for saturation or desaturation. Lots of fine tuning, impossible in LR.

For example...

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russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

PaintShop Pro has something similar to the Liquify tool. It's under Effects ► Distortion Effects ► Warp. I don't find it as easy to use as Photoshop's Liquify tool, but with some practice, it's not bad.

Old Redeye Loc: San Mateo, CA

:thumbup:

Mark7829 Loc: Calfornia

Imagine if it were true that LR was superior to PS ACR for IQ. Do you think professionals would ever use ACR? In this column, a subscriber provided statistics on user preferences and most professionals use PS exclusively.

As for the sliders, one slider can negate the function of another. In working in combination, the affects can be different but not because one has a greater range than another but rather how they affect each other.

ACR and LR share the same basic IQ functionality. I don't find any differences in output. I base this on my experience in teaching post processing at the college level for the last 15 years.

nikonwaddy

"A couple of times of setting them to maximum sharpness and back to default proved definitively that the RAW files were affected by the camera's settings. Which, of course, is only logical. Otherwise, the camera's settings would be grayed out or otherwise wouldn't work if one was shooting RAW files only. But they do work, and they do affect the RAW file."

russellray

Does the Picture Control Setting also affect JPEG images? In the studio I shoot both RAW and JPEG as often the models want to see the images shortly after shot and for me now JPEG's are more handy to quickly display.

caljr Loc: Indiana

I'm on a Mac and use iPhoto with iPhoto library manager version 4.1.5 by Fat Cat software http://www.fatcatsoftware.com. iPhoto library manager keeps my images organized in folders, then from ilm I can drag the images into photoshop if they need editing then save the edited images back to ilm. This software has never crashed on me in 8 years and I have 20 thousand Hi res images on this program. I duplicate my images automatically with copy cloner to an external 3 TB HD every Sunday night for safe keeping.

Mark7829 Loc: Calfornia

Post processing with JPEG files are limited. Data necessary for increased detail and other tonal changes are lost/discarded. RAW images are flat and beg for post processing. JPEG could look better in an initial review but RAW gives you the highest IQ attainable and often spectacular.

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

I completely agree. However, different RAW images have different levels of "flat." That's one reason why different camera manufacturers (Nikon, Canon, etc.) have different RAW formats. Out of all the different RAW formats that I have experimented with (with the help of several friends when it came to having RAW formats from Nikon, Sony, and a couple of others), Adobe's DNG RAW format is the flattest of the flat. Thus, whenever I come home from the field with my daily average of 500 pictures, the first thing I do is send my CR2 files through the DNG converter and then delete the CR2 files. Saves up to 30% disk space and gives me the flattest of the flat to begin working with.