RAW Mode White Balance
- Thread starter nmbeg
- Start date
TitusvileSurfer
New member
The very purpose of RAW relates to no white balance adjustment. If your daughter needed 50 stitches, would you rather do the job yourself or trust a completely random doctor who doesn't know you exist? The random doctor would be the choice of shooting JPEG. I would taken my daughter to a random doctor gladly. Hopefully he would work gently and precise. As a physician yourself Nmbeg, you have the training, experience, and sterile equipment to take care of your own daughter.
Personally I don't want to leave the editing fate of an unexpected masterpiece photograph to the hands of an intelligent but perhaps less capable computer. I'll decide what data captured by the camera to throw away myself. I can take hundreds of full blown RAW photos on a 4 gig memory card and care to take the time to edit them so why not?
Personally I don't want to leave the editing fate of an unexpected masterpiece photograph to the hands of an intelligent but perhaps less capable computer. I'll decide what data captured by the camera to throw away myself. I can take hundreds of full blown RAW photos on a 4 gig memory card and care to take the time to edit them so why not?
shirley386
Member
I use Picasa from Google. It's a free download. It has a white balance slider. I don't find GIMP very useful for working on RAW files. I normally adjust white balance in Picasa, save as JPEG, and finish editing in GIMP.
There's another RAW editor that I use sometimes: Raw Therapee. It's a free download too. Google them both and give them a try.
There's another RAW editor that I use sometimes: Raw Therapee. It's a free download too. Google them both and give them a try.
nmbeg - One thing to understand about shooting RAW is that none of the settings are "baked" into the final image. Even if you pre-set a WB nothing has changed in the image. All that setting does is tell your software where to put the slider when you open the image. TS's analogy really isn't correct in that you're still in control and you haven't given anything up by setting a WB if you're shooting RAW.
Aperture is and option but I prefer Lightroom, they have similar functionality and are at about the same price point. Your camera, also, should have come with Digital Photo Professional (DPP) with also works fine (some say better). Also, having an editor like Photoshop is helpful but you can get almost all of the same functionality out of PS Elements and a much lower cost.
Aperture is and option but I prefer Lightroom, they have similar functionality and are at about the same price point. Your camera, also, should have come with Digital Photo Professional (DPP) with also works fine (some say better). Also, having an editor like Photoshop is helpful but you can get almost all of the same functionality out of PS Elements and a much lower cost.
TitusvileSurfer
New member
What I meant to say is that if you shoot JPEG, the camera will edit the image for you. It picks the white balance, sharpens the image, fiddles with the saturation maybe, and throws away any information deemed "extra". If you shoot RAW it doesn't throw any information away and lets you make all of the big decisions yourself. I would second Picasso if you don't want to conform to Photoshop.
