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22 Nov 2003
I'd been looking forward to going to the MacExpo for weeks; piles of great Apple products and hundreds of other Mac-fans--what could be better? My impression was that there weren't quite as many exhibitors as last year, but there was still a lot to see. Apple was there with the whole range of hardware on display, and was running seminars on the new features in Panther, the G5 and so on. Adobe was there too, showing off their new Creative Suite. There were some very good seminars--particularly the ones run by Adobe on tips and tricks with Photoshop. Of course, this meant that I immediately wanted two things: a copy of Photoshop CS and a new digital camera that will write RAW files. RAW files are the cat's pyjamas! I wouldn't have to worry about exposure settings at all then—just shoot in RAW, then fiddle with the sliders until it looked good.
Apple always displays their hardware so well (on uplit perspex benches) that even the eMacs looked good. The new iMacs with the 20" screens were very pretty, and the G5s were superb. The word 'fast' isn't really adequate to describe the G5. Applications open before you even think about what you want to do. So I'll console myself with the thought that I value my 'staring into space' time while waiting for applications to load too much to get a G5. Well, I don't think I even convinced myself with that...
I had a good play with some very nice Fujifilm cameras (the FinePix S5000 and S7000). I like my Nikon Coolpix 885 a lot, but the menus make it a pain to adjust settings for manual shooting, and there's no aperture priority setting, which would be very handy. As often happens at these things, I found that chatting so some of the smaller exhibitors (small in the size of their companies, not their stature) was one of the most fun things. The woman at Crumpler Bags was very nice, and the nice Canadians from Harmony Remote were good value, too. Entertainment was also provided by Quark. I only sat down at the presentation because there were plenty of free chairs, and I was tired, but I quickly became mesmerised by the rapidly falling battery level on the Quark guy's iBook. Would he be able to finish his presentation before the juice ran out? It was like an episode of 24.
Everyone seemed to be having a good time. There was a G5 games arcade, in which young lads wearing hoodies fragged the bejesus out of one another. I must be the world's most useless computer games player, so I didn't even have the courage to try out the "Finding Nemo" kinds game. Besides, getting whupped by a six-year old in public is never nice.
Showing what I feel was an inhuman level of self-control, I managed not to buy anything at all. When I left that show, I found a voicemail message waiting for me from Mr. Bsag. He asked me to call him before I left the show. I immediately knew that this couldn't be good news—he has no interest in Mac (or any other computer) stuff, so it could only mean that he had broken something. Sure enough, it turned out that he had split a cup of tea all over the iMac keyboard. We've washed it out now and left it to dry properly, but I don't know if it's going to work again. Oh well...
2
djn1: Really? In the demo, the presenter had some really woefully badly exposed images, and the Photoshop RAW tools did a really good job of fixing them up. Of course, it would be better to expose properly in the first place.
Jonathon: I can imagine that -- they seem like that kind of company. I was really tempted by a Wack-O-Phone, but I had promised not to spend anything, so I just had to look at it longingly. I have a Crumpler camera bag, though, which is really beautifully made.
3
bsag: a RAW image - straight out of the camera; i.e. prior to any post-processing - will always look badly exposed but the image contains a full tonal range nonetheless. For example, one of the images I posted recently was of a lily. The end result can be seen here:
http://cgi.synchrony.plus.com/iblog/archives/000086.php
... while a small version of the RAW image from which this picture was created can be seen here:
http://www.synchrony.plus.com/outwith/lily4_raw.jpg
As you can see, this image looks badly exposed, but it isn't.
Where RAW images score over jpeg's is that i) there isn't any compression of the image so when you work on it you don't exaggerate any existing jpeg artefacts, and ii) I think that most cameras encode RAW images at 12bit rather than 8bit � meaning that it's possible to create a much 'smoother' final result by editing the image in 16bit mode in Photoshop. I tried to explain some of this here:
http://cgi.synchrony.plus.com/blog/archives/000081.php
So the upshot of all this is that I suppose there's something in your point regarding the possibility of rescuing rescue more detail from a RAW image, but this is more to do with editing in 16bit mode rather than anything to do with the image format itself. For example, if an image is underexposed then Photoshop has more chance of remapping the levels to something acceptable in 16bit mode, than in 8bit mode (as it has 65,535 levels to work with rather than 255). And the fact that there isn't already some jpeg compression (or artefacts) also helps matters. However, if an image is overexposed � i.e. the highlights are blown out � then it wont make any difference how you edit the image nor what format it�s in as there isn't any detail in those areas of the image to start with.
I expect that could have been put more succinctly but I haven't quite got my head around all this yet myself.
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djn1: I stand corrected. And that was a very clear explanation. One of these days, I'll learn about the technical aspects of photography 
My so-called technique is a bit haphazard at the moment.
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bsag: I heartily recommend Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for Photographers by Martin Evening. It's a bit pricey but it's an excellent book.
1
"I wouldn�t have to worry about exposure settings at all then�just shoot in RAW, then fiddle with the sliders until it looked good".
I wish that were the case. RAW output is great, particularly if you're going to manipulate an image in any way, but expose incorrectly and the image will look just as bad as if it were a jpeg. I quite fancy a copy of Photoshop CS though:
http://cgi.synchrony.plus.com/blog/archives/000081.php----- The Crumper folks are indeed lovely - I rang them earlier in the year to track down a local dealer of their cycling bags. We got chatting, and they tipped out the contents of somebody's Seedy Three courier bag and started packing it with coffee mugs, VHS cassettes, and other standard-sized items, so I could get an idea of how big it was. Then they sold me one from their own stock, which arrived beautifully-packed the next day.
It's a cracking good bag, as well.
by Jonathan Sanderson @ 22/11/2003 9:12 pm • Permalink •