Re: recommendation for digital camera -=> Shameless Nikon plug

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

listcomm@ml1.net writes:

> The real benefit to having the Windoze apps (Nikon or not) to support
> the camera is in being able to load camera (or film scanner) images
> directly into something like Photoshop without having to go through
> any JPEG or other compression, so that you can manipulate raw
> images.

Note, this only matters if you have set the camera to save things as
RAW format.  If the camera is saving JPEGs, the software can't
convert them back into RAW... info has already been lost.

Why does RAW matter?  It is uncompressed and has more bits than a
JPEG (12 bits on my D1x) so you have more range when doing exposure
adjustments and whatnot.

There's a program called dcraw which will convert many forms of
camera raw files into standard formats for editing.  But it's not
quite as good as the Nikon Capture software, because Capture makes it
very easy to do common things like fix exposure and has cool toys
like DEE which is basically a magic exposure fixer.  Nothing you
can't do without capture, but you have to work harder to get there.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - I am the rocks.