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@@ -121,3 +121,59 @@ When you have things set up that way hit... wait for it... escape to save your c ### Example Edits (Video) {: #example } Okay, you now have Darktable set up just like I do. This may or may not end up suiting you, but for now it gives you place to start. To show you how I work within this setup, check out the video below and then you can jump to the next article in this series, which covers what each module does and how I use them. + + +## Make Better Pictures. + +A few things to note: + +* I am not a professional photographer. I have been making photographs for 35 years now, but I've never tried to make a living at it, nor do I have any interest in nor any clue how you do that. I am just having fun. + +* I am not trying to make fine art prints. Photography to me has always been in service of or to illustrate a story. Occasionally I manage a photograph that tells a story on its own, but that's rarely a goal. Usually I am shooting with the idea that the image will supplement words, not stand on its own. + +* There is no single "correct" way to make a photograph. Most of my favorite photographs—both my own and those of others—have technical flaws. I am not interested in whether an image is tack sharp, has a perfect histogram, or is even in focus. I am interested in whether or not it tells a story. Which might seem ironic considering point two there, but it's not because for me a photograph doesn't have to tell the whole story, it has to tell *a* story. + +### Take Control of Your Camera + +Today's cameras want to do everything for you. I don't think that's any way to live or photograph. You'll never get any better if you leave your camera on full auto and mash the shutter. + +If you want to make better photos you're going to have to turn off the automatic features and figure it out for yourself. Sorry. There is no easy way to learn things, you have to struggle, otherwise you don't learn. + +Tough love people, but there it is. And there's going to be a learning curve to taking pictures using manual settings. At first you're going to suck at it. Your images are going to look even worse than when you were using full auto. That's okay, this won't last long. + +The first thing you need to do is turn on RAW image capture in your camera. Head to your camera's settings page and look for something that says "format" or "file format" or something where the setting is currently "JPG". Now look for the option that says RAW. Select that and you've just unlocked a tremendous amount of control over your images. + +### What is Camera RAW? + +I recommend shooting RAW format images over JPEGs because RAW stores far more information about the scene you're shooting. + +Everything your camera's sensor is capable of recording is stored in that RAW file. JPEG on the other hand has already made some decisions about the scene. As with anything automated, sometimes your JPEGs will look great (especially Fujifilm cameras), but I prefer to record the scene in RAW and make the decisions about how things should look afterward in software. + +To understand the difference between JPEG and RAW consider the color data your sensor is recording. The RAW file can hold billions of colors, every bit of color data your sensor saw is stored in the RAW file. To create a JPEG your camera squashes those billions of color down to 16 million (roughly the max the JPEG file format can store) and throws the rest away. The same is true of the luminosity. A RAW image will store the entire dynamic range of the scene, while a JPEG cannot. + +Simply put: Camera RAW images store the scene as it was recorded for you to play with later in software. JPEG images store the scene the way your camera's algorithms think it should look. If you're happy with that, awesome. Why are you reading this? If you're not happy with that, read on. + +### How to Get the Most out of Camera RAW + +The advantage of JPEG images is that you press the shutter and you're done. Well, you transfer the image to your computer or phone and then you're done. With RAW images you need to process them. Think of raw images as a film negative, you need to develop them into prints. + +First though, a few notes on the quirks of shooting RAW. + +To get the most out of shooting RAW images you need to understand how camera sensors record data, especially how *your* camera's sensor records data. There's considerable variation in the dynamic range that sensors are capable of, but in general it is easier to recover dark parts of an image than highlights. + +In digital photography you can think of pure white as no information at all. Since information is what we're after, overexposure, where your image is overly bright, is bad. + +The opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea though, and that's the case here as well. While you *can* recover quite a bit of color information from very dark regions of your RAW image, there is a cost: noise. Noise is the little colored dots you see when you zoom in on your image. From a distance they make your image look muddy, blurry, and washed out. + +The ideal is get the majority of tones in your image between those extremes. There is a theory, which I do not subscribe too, called "exposing to the left", which says you should deliberately, slightly, overexpose your image to get more data in the RAW file. Then you can darken when you develop it in Darktable. I think the risk of botching this, and seriously overexposing your image, outweighs the nominal benefit it confers. That said, sometimes, especially when shooting portraits that I plan to convert to black and white and use a "high key" tone mapping, I do overexpose on purpose to make sure skin tones render with as little noise as possible. + +Most of the time though, I do what you should do: I underexpose to protect the lighter areas of the image from overexposure and then lighten the shadows as needed when processing. + +### Settings for RAW Photography + +If you're just getting started, and you've just turned on RAW in your camera. I suggest you concentrate on learning to use the aperture to your advantage. The mode for this is called aperture priority and is usually on a dial marked with an A, or maybe AP. Putting you camera in this mode lets you set the aperture, or f-stop + + + + +[^1]: *Dynamic Range* refers to the range of tones between the lightest and darkest tones in an image. Often the start and stop is pure white to pure black, but it doesn't have to be. It's just the range between the darkest and lightest pixels. |