The truth about raw processors: which one actually performs best for real-world photography?
Terry A. McDonald – www.luxBorealis.com
We shoot raw files to extract as much information from a scene as is technically possible. Photographers choose raw capture because they place a higher value on quality, legacy, and individual vision than on having ’ready-made’ machine JPEGs, compressed and sharpened. Over the decades I’ve been working in digital, I have yet to meet an image file that didn’t benefit from editing, and raw is the place to start. But are we getting the most from our raw files?
I’ve been using Lightroom for as long as it has existed, and Photoshop before that. Naturally, I’m curious—is Lightroom extracting all the data it can and optimizing it to provide the highest image quality possible from my sensor? I’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money to get that raw file, I want to ensure I’m getting the most bang for my buck. The only guarantee of that is through testing.
This is the first in a series of investigations examining how to extract the highest quality from a...
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Terry McDonald is an artist, author and educator, working in fine art landscape and nature photography. He approaches photography as both an art and a craft: a solid grounding in technique frees him to explore a variety of visual styles. As a photographer his goal seems simple enough: capture and recreate the inherent art in nature. However, nature is not always so accommodating!
Although Terry grew up and has lived most his life in Canada, he has lived, worked and photographed overseas for 10 years in Tanzania, Germany and, more recently, England. Additional travel destinations have included much of western Europe, across Canada to two of three coats, South Africa, south Florida, the Galápagos and Iceland. Terry lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario, his home base for hiking, backcountry canoeing and nordic skiing. When time permits, he offers classroom and field workshops throughout the year.
Terry’s work has been featured in Photo Life and Light & Landscape and is in private collections on three continents. His work may be viewed at luxBorealis.com or at his luxBorealis Flickr account.
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