Posts tagged Digital Photogtraphy

Anyone will tell you that you should shoot photographs in raw format.  That means the data straight off the sensor is stored together with the settings in the camera at the time you took the shot.  Then software on your computer re-assembles it on request.  Other formats (Like JPEG) do the assembling in the camera and once the omelet is made you can’t unscramble the eggs and fix any mistakes.

Nikon cameras raw format is called NEF and provided you get the latest codec from the Nikon website and install it in windows, you can view and print pictures just like you can with JPEGs. Nikon has quite a good NEF processing program to fix things like exposure and white balance and save the fixed file. You can even change things like titles and comments in Windows Explorer.

The problem comes when you bump up against the restrictions in the Nikon program and decide to use the market leading (by many miles) image processing program Adobe Photoshop Elements.

First off Photoshop Elements has about as much relationship to the Photoshop that professional designers use as a box brownie has to a modern SLR. It is a completely different program. So as I didn’t want to fork out six hundred quid for the pro product I have to learn something completely new.  To be fair my grasp of the user interface in Photoshop CS was pretty feeble at best so maybe not such a bad thing.

It is truly a steaming heap. It won’t save NEF files - oh no. It has its own ‘standard’ raw file format. So you end up with two files, the original plus the adobe version which you have saved with changes.  Sorry make that three because if you change the data stored with the image (like the title) it creates another XML file with the extra information in rather than update the original NEF file.

The so called standard raw format from Adobe has only one codec written.  That is a release candidate and is for 32 bit Vista only.  Only having a release candidate for a superseded operating system doesn’t exactly suggest a wild enthusiasm for the standard. I suspect serves you right for not having a mac. So unless you are a 32 bit Vista user you are pretty much stuck with Elements for any sort of organising task.  At which it is indifferent at best.

The UI is dreadful. The Organiser program is a completely different program from the editing program. There is yet another program which only does raw processing. 

The whole thing is a mess.