These notes were what I took; obviously, I didn't write down stuff that I knew, so lots of stuff was covered that's not listed here. Similarly, there were a couple of things, particularly related to color management, that I just didn't get, so of course was unable to take notes on those, either.
My question was basically this: When you take a photo, certain things affect the little voltages on the pixels of the CCD and how those voltages are read off into the digital memory. Obviously the shutter speed, lens settings, et cetera affect the amount of light that arrives at a pixel, and obviously the ISO setting is just a sort of amplifier for the voltage in the CCD before it is converted to digital.
I assume that once these voltages are converted to digital data, that's what's in the RAW format file, together with a listing of the other settings (white balance, sharpening, tone compensation ...) that were in effect when the photo was taken. What I wanted to know was: are these things like white balance, exposure compensation, et cetera, completely flexible, or do the camera settings change the RAW data.
For example, if I set up a test situation with the camera locked in a tripod, unchanging light, and so on, and take two photos -- one with exposure compensation 0 and the other with exposure compensation of +1, then if I import those two into Photoshop or the Nikon editor but tell it to go back to 0 on the one exposed at +1, will they be identical? My crude experiments indicate that they are not, and thus that RAW mode is not completely flexible on these things.
The answer as that yes, some of the RAW results do depend on the settings, and which ones and by how much are proprietary information. Durrence said that the white balance, however, was completely flexible.
Get a firewire card reader to speed up transfer to your computer.
Eye-one "hockey puck" to get color profile of screen. It's about $300, but to get color profile of paper, you're talking $1400 ... By Gretag Macbeth. Make sure the one you get works on an LCD as well as a regular screen.
Smartdisk Flashtrax: This is a little stand-alone system with 30 or 40 gigs of storage that will read a compact flash, and display the images on a little screen.
Ipod + Belkin reader: same as above, but no preview of the photos.
All printers are about equal quality -- cost gives more speed, larger print, printing from a roll, et cetera. Good printers are Epson 1280 ~$400 and Epson 2200 ~$600. The 1280 is a Dye sub printer and the 2200 is a pigment printer. Pigment printers have a 100 year display life; dye sub printers, 25 year.
For embedded color profile management when Photoshop asks, the right answer is usually "Don't color manage".
Use Adobe RGB for both screen and printing. If you know you're doing only screen stuff or only printing, consider the other two settings.
Use USPrepress defaults.
Convert to sRGB for web photos.
I don't understand this yet: Didlick says: "Use Image->Mode->Assign Profile" first, then "Image->Mode->convert Profile". Has to do with the assignments of RGB-triplets and actual colors. The second command actually changes the RGB numbers.
To get white point: Image->Levels, then double-click eyebropper for "white", and click on a white thing in the image (whites of eyes are good). Then, in Lab Color, set a = b = 0 to whiten. Alternatively, after clicking on a white (or gray) object, look at the RGB color and set all to the highest of the three values.
Info box: Use K (Black), RGB, XY, and WH for the four displayed values (unless you need CMYK for something).
Want to send me mail? Click: ( tomrdavis@earthlink.net)