It’s also nice if you want to show someone else your pictures while you’re shooting. Most people don’t have a RAW converter on their computer, but you can still show them the JPGs.
Also, like you said, my computer won’t show thumbnails for RAW pictures.
(It’s moot for me anyways, I’ve always shot in JPG)
I guess.
However, I don’t like to show anyone my shots until I’ve prettied them up. 
mmm
I like to think my shots are pretty right out of the camera 
Actually, a buddy of mine is about to get his restaurant featured on a very prominent show on the Travel Channel partially based on some pictures I took of his food. The only photoshopping done to most of the pictures was some cropping.
But I understand what you’re saying. I typically like to play with them a bit first. But lately I’ve been pretty lucky and my levels and white balance have been spot on right out of the camera. But I do keep a close eye on my histogram while I’m shooting and adjust as necessary. Photoshop is a great tool, but, as they say, garbage in/garbage out. The better the picture you have to start with, the better the end result.
If I am indoors at a party or something like that, I want to catch the people having fun unconscious of the camera, so I will set at a high ISO (T3i goes to 6400) and then let it do auto mode on everything else.
Landscapes I will adjust around the aperture, and I like around 8.0. I use low ISO and a tripod if necessary, I like to get everything sharp for my still landscapes.
Oh God, me neither. Not a single picture of mine gets put up online without me processing it in some way or another.
RAW images - at least mine - are never ready for public viewing right out of the gate.
mmm
Well if you ever get your computer in line I’d love to see the differences.
My main bodies are the Canon 5D and the Nikon D3. Yeah, I know, weird. (Long story short, I’ve always been a Nikon shooter, but just was pissed off that Nikon couldn’t make a decent high ISO camera. I bought the 5D, fell in love with it, and was just about to switch to Canon when Nikon came out of nowhere with the incredible D3. Glad I stuck around.)
Anyhow:
RAW
About 90% of the time I’m in manual. If I’m not in manual exposure mode, I’m in aperture priority. I can’t remember the last time I shot anything in shutter priority or program mode. Nothing wrong with the automatic modes–some photographers really rock them, but, in most cases I find manual to be better for me.
The vast majority of my work is at f/2.8 or more open. If I’m shooting landscapes or architecture or whatnot, yeah, I’ll be in the f/11 range, but most of the time, I’m wide open. If I’m going group shots, then I’ll also push it to f/4 or f/5.6, depending.
7 fps on the D3 (that’s my custom low setting–full speed is 9 fps). The 5D is 3 fps (that’s as fast as it goes, and the major thing I dislike about the 5D). My preference is to have a camera with a minimum of 5 fps. Anything less feels sluggish to me.
Auto-white balance. I’m lazy about this when I shoot RAW, since I can just batch correct it in post. When I shot JPEG, I would custom white balance as much as possible using a white card.
Auto-focus, single point. Usually set to continuous/AI Servo. The only time I move to single/One Shot mode is when I need the red assist beam on my flash.
AF is set to back button only. I like my AF decoupled from my shutter. Thumb is autofocus, forefinger is the shutter.
There’s a number of reasons I like manual exposure mode, and a number of places where it’s either necessary to shoot manual exposure or apply exposure compensation to achieve the effect you’re looking for (or to get the “correct” exposure.)
The simplest example of where manual exposure is useful is when I’m, say, doing a portrait session outdoors where the light is constant. Depending on my framing and what other elements are in the picture, the camera may think there’s more or less light in the image. Remember, the camera doesn’t know what it’s looking at, and it’s going to try to achieve a distribution of tones from dark to light that it thinks the scene should have. The exposure algorithms are a bit more complicated these days, but, to simplify, the camera is shooting for an average of tones to be 18% gray.
So, point your camera at a completely white sheet. Take a picture in an automatic exposure mode. Now point your camera at a completely black field. Take a picture. You should have the exact or almost exact same picture: a medium gray field, even though the objects in reality are white and black. The camera is just trying to average both to gray.
Back to my portrait example. So I’m out shooting in constant lighting, but my camera may vary the exposure by 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop in either direction (in average circumstances–it can be more exaggerated in certain instances) because of varying elements in the frame. This isn’t fatal–it shouldn’t ruin your picture generally, you can tweak it later–but why give yourself the extra work? Also, when you start taking advantage of batch correcting in a program like Lightroom or Aperture or whatnot, you just correct that first photo and, as long as the lighting stays the same throughout your batch, you can just paste that correction across all the pictures in your set. If you were in automatic metering mode, you might have to tweak some pictures up a 1/3 of a stop, others down 1/3, and this also effects your contrast curves slightly, so you have that to deal with, etc.
Another case is in dramatic lighting conditions. Some of the coolest pictures are in lighting situations that the camera has a difficult time figuring out. When you encounter high contrast lighting situations, like say rim lighting at one extreme, the autoexposure is going to try to expose that picture to get shadow and midtone detail, which is going to completely kill the mood. Now that is an example of studio rim lighting, but you see this all the time in real life, like during sunrise and sunset, at bars, in theatres, etc. To properly preserve the mood of the shot and your artistic vision, you have to shoot this manual or dial in a good amount of exposure compensation (how much depends on the strength of the light, but usually at least 1.5-2 stops.)
When shooting indoors with flash, this is perhaps the most useful time to shoot manual. Effective flash use requires the photographer to balance flash with ambient light, and the way you control ambient light is through your camera exposure. Let’s say you’re in a bar. Your friend is sitting on a stool next to you, in a relatively dark area, while in the background you have some cool neon lights or other atmospheric lighting. If you take a picture of your friend on full auto or P, the camera will take a well-exposed picture of your friend, but absolutely kill the background, because it will usually default to a 1/60 second shutter speed. So, if you’re in a room where the background ambient is 1/15 f/2.8 and your camera is giving you 1/60 f/2.8, you’re losing a lot of mood and detail. Now, if you’re in A mode, it will go slower than that. The problem now is it’s generally going to set the exposure for the same exposure as a flash-less picture. Remember how I said your friend is sitting in a dark part of the bar? While it 1/15 f/2.8 may be fine to get the mood of the room in the background, your camera also is metering for this big black blob in front of you, so you might be getting a reading of 1/4 or even 1/2 and you’ll get far too much foreground ambient and a lot of “ghosting”. This may or may not be desirable, depending on what you’re going for, but by shooting manual, you can just dial in the precise amount of ambient light you need.
I know that got technical, and there’s a lot in there to try to understand–I wish I had some pictures to show all the situations in which a manual setting or overriding the auto setting with exposure compensation is useful, as it would be easier to understand when you can see the differences immediately.
With my Canon T1i, when I’m just ‘walking around’ in tourist mode or whatever, I generally leave it in ‘creative auto’. This is a mode on the Canon cameras from the T1i up which is an automatic mode but gives you more control over depth of field, flash, etc. In this mode, there are two sliders on the display - one for depth of field (from ‘blurred’ to ‘sharp’), and one for exposure compensation (‘dark’ to ‘light’). One press of the ‘set’ button and I can use the thumb wheel to change depth of field within some limits.
In that mode, there are also shortcut controls for changing the flash settings, changing the shutter from single shot to multiple, and a couple of other regularly-used settings.
The big advantage of this mode is speed - if I see something interesting, I can be snapping pictures in a couple of seconds with a reasonable amount of control over how the camera is setting up the scene.
But if I stop to take the time to set up a good shot, I’m always going into either aperture or shutter priority - aperture priority probably about 95% of the time, with shutter priority only when I need to get action shots, or freeze the water in a fountain, or otherwise control the shot with shutter.
If I’m really setting up a shot where I’ve got an external flash, reflectors, and all that kind of stuff, then I’m generally in manual mode, and I also tend to use exposure bracketing and take photos in bursts of 3 so I’ve always got one closest enough to the exposure I’m looking for. Also, that opens the door to doing HDR in post-processing.
I shoot in RAW exclusively. I’ve got a workflow set up so that after I download all my photos I run a batch to convert them all to JPG at a nice screen resolution and dump the JPGs in a temporary folder. I go through those deciding which ones I like, and for the others I delete them plus the original RAW images. With the remainder, I go back to the RAW files and tweak the ones that need to be tweaked - usually that involves touching up the contrast or the white balance or cropping. When I’m done, I output the tweaked RAW files as JPG at whatever resolution I need, then I archive the RAW files.
Pulykamell - nice job explaining manual.
Sam Stone - I like your workflow. Do you convert to JPEG first because it speeds up the process initially? (I’m finding that my RAWs seem to take longer and longer to load and work with). I think I’m going to try it your way. I also have to start forcing myself to delete the non-keepers right away.
mmm
You use Lightroom, right? What I do is after import go to Library > Previews > Render 1:1 previews and go away for awhile. (Or you can do standard-sized previews if you don’t need to zoom and judge critical sharpness.) You might already have this as default import setting, but I don’t. Essentially, what this does is create a temporary folder of pre-rendered JPEGs.
Also, make sure you’re looking at the photos in the Library module (hit ‘E’) and not in the Develop module. Flicking through photos in the Library module is significantly faster than in Develop. I edit anywhere from 2,500 - 10,000+ photos per week during my high season, so a mere one second in time savings can add up to nearly 3 hours of work on the initial pre-edit (culling) stage.
Indeed. Thank you.
Yes, I do render 1:1 previews already - I even figured out the ‘walking away’ part - but I didn’t realize this creates JPEGs. Are they actually JPEGs??
I have just recently noticed a slow-down in the speed in which images load. I do look through them in Library, but there is significant load time of a single image when going to Develop.
Do you store your files on an internal or external drive? Mine are on an external connected via USB; I’m sure that slows things a bit, but lately I’ve had major slowdowns.
mmm
It is, but a very obfuscated JPEG.
All my editing is done on an internal drive. I seem to get slow speeds from an external drive, so I rarely edit from one. Have you optimized your catalog lately? What are the specs of your machine. When you look through them in the library module, does it seem slow to you? How big is your catalog?
Here’s an interesting speed-up tip I’ve never heard of before that might be interesting, too.
Just got a fun little fixed-lens camera a month ago, and it has displaced my SLR.
I like to set things for aperture priority, wide open (f1.9). I tend to set white balance to “cloudy” because I always heard that Nikon trick. I’m rethinking that strategy.
The camera has three user settings on the top-knob: next to “P”, “A”, and “S”, there is “MY1”, “MY2”, and “MY3”.
I set up MY1 for black-and-white high contrast (this camera’s forte).
MY2 is set for fast street photography snapshots: no focus needed, just mash the button and it takes a photo at 2.5m or somesuch distance.
And for postprocessing, I’m having a blast with Aperture and my new favorite software: Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2
This is the gold standard for color-to-B&W conversion, providing all kinds of film stock emulations and really nice film grain.
Here’s four that turned out particularly nicely (from older photographs)
I’m going to try out some of the tips regarding manual settings. I like the idea of setting things up right for whatever I am doing and then snapping away without concern for exposure.
