In Camera RAW Editing

The day my main workstation died, I was without a backup for some time. Although I had a 6 year old dusty, clunky laptop whose internal memory capacity I could have filled in a couple of photoshoots, I was pretty much unable to work on photographs for awhile, as Photoshop CS4 Extended would have been the proverbial last straw on the poor old thing's creaking back.

Instead I was stuck for a short while with no way of editing raw files. Shooting in jpeg was one option, but I really did not want to give away the dynamic range, white balance adjustability and general flexibility of RAW files.

However, the home page of my soon-to-be launched website was looking very dejectedly blank on the welcome page, and I decided a placeholder should be placed on it, at the very least.

Turns out that the RAW editor in your camera can be quite a useful tool. Sports and journalist photographers have long known this - in the time-limited world of headlines and deadlines, lengthy processing and tweaking is simply not an option. Jpeg is always an option, of course, but there is very little leeway comparitively when it comes to post-processing in case it's required.


So I set up the camera, SB800 ringflash on camera, and an SB600 camera right, illuminating a little deck of cards I built (Insulating tape played a crucial role, if you must know - three attempts at going it the 'proper' way resulting in a mess of cards and an infuriated photographer)


Not the most detailed or groundbreaking of images, but I thought it might convey the fact that the site was underway, and nearly completed.

The shot was at night, on a wooden table in a tungsten-illuminated room. Even with the tungsten white balance selected, the colours were not quite right, still overly warm. Instead of switching to manual WB, I decided to test out the RAW editor in-camera.

The RAW editor is surprisingly powerful even in lower-end cameras. The camera I was using was only a lowly Nikon D5000 (chosen over a D90 or a D300s for reasons many people would love to dispute :) )

With this, I had the option to use distortion correction, correct for exposure and WB, select picture control, straighten the picture and even apply a fisheye effect and correct for perspective! For most pictures, this is more than enough processing ability to produce acceptable images.

There is also a quick retouch option, similar to Auto-Levels in Photoshop, with an option of High, Normal or Low, with a preview to show what's happening at each setting.

Although for accurate colour reproduction, I would not trust the uncalibrated LCD screen (for example, deep purples often appear a rich blue) I thought a black and white look would suit the image, which was easily applied in the in-camera RAW editor using the MC or monochrome picture control. The 'UNDER CONSTRUCTION' was added later. Very simple, and not too bad.


On a side note, slightly busy bokeh (out of focus rendition, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ) from the AF-S 35mm f1.8G in the lower corner. A bit of an issue sometimes, although I'm not sure if it's my copy or usual for this lens.





Please visit www.basilphotography.com for more information on Basil Lim Photography.

To view Basil Lim's latest pictures, see his Flickr site at www.flickr.com/photos/basil_lim

To contact Basil Lim, please email contact@basilphotography.com