I've had a Nikon D100 for about two years now, and have been shooting large jpg or Tiff images. I'm mostly an outdoors photographer; shooting my N scale railroad isn't a strength. Lately, I started shooting in the Nikon raw format (NEF). Wow! Just as the D100 gave my old photography interests a boost, the NEF format has given me a second boost. I'm using the Adobe Photoshop CS front end for raw camera; it speaks to me in terms I can understand, such as color temperature in degrees C., and exposure in F-stops. It gives me a color histogram that I can actually read, and lots of other goodies. Since there is no in-camera processing, I can also shoot a whole lot faster, with smaller file sizes (9.5 Mbytes vs. 17.3 Mbytes for a Tiff). I will pick up Nikon Capture this week, which I understand is an even better front end. I know that the D100 appears to underexpose by about 0.7 to 1.0 F-stops, in order to preserve highlights. Indoors, however, I don't lose highlights when I increase exposure by the same 0.7 to 1.0 F-stop. Is this just the flatter lighting, I wonder? I've also found that I have to turn the color temperature down to about 2700 C. I'm using about 5000 watts of halogen worklights, which I just read are closer to 2700 than a photoflood's 3200 C. Anyone else experience the same color shift with halogens? Once I'm fully back up (I had a hernia repaired two days ago), I'm going to use the worklights only for background lighting, and use a 1000 W. photoflood as the main light. It seems to me that the photofloods just deliver much more light per watt than the halogens (which have perhaps 10 hours on them). I think I won't have a problem with a 2700 C. background lighting and a 3200 C. main light--or am I kidding myself? Should I reverse the scheme? One thing I really like about raw is that I can "fix" things to my liking and then save everything as a Tiff with a full range of luminosity, color, etc. This includes minor edits to take out things like wrong background detail, spots on the backdrop, feeder wires in just the wrong location, etc. Editors and art directors seem to hate it when I play with Tiffs, especially if it has to do with color or dynamic range, as they can detect it. If I play in raw, then save as tiff, they should have a baseline image (that I like) that they can change to their heart's content. Or am I kidding myself again? All for now.
Bill, I'm planning on taking a few. I doubt the downsizing required (well, optional) for Railimages will truly show the difference. Taking a 17 Mbyte (or more) Tiff image down to a 100 K jpg loses a lot of the subtleties. I do have a few of the same scenes already. The problem is that they were taken months apart, so that scenery advances muddle the photo-quality issues. It's hard to compare bare plywood with a finished scene. What I need to do is take small parts of the images and use them as examples. That's going to take a while, I'm afraid.
