Sunday, August 21, 2011

LX5 photographs in Aperture: JPEG vs. RAW

I have been using the "nostalgic" film mode in LX5 (and before that in LX3). There is nothing nostalgic about this mode - in fact, it is the most realistic of all the film modes, and best of all, it doesn't oversaturate the greens as often happens in camera JPEGs.

Now that I have switched to using Aperture, it is relatively easy to tweak the RAW files. But also it seems to be very hard to get similar results as in JPEGs with the nostalgic film mode.

Here is a comparison pair, first one is JPEG and the second one is derived from a RAW file. I tuned down the greens, but still the result is rather different than the JPEG. Reality would somewhere between these two version, a bit closer to the JPEG than to the RAW interpretation.

I'm certainly interested in exploring the possibilities of RAW files, but I would like to be able to get something that seems like the real world out of it. Well, I'm just in the beginning of learning Aperture, and it shows.

2 comments:

Dennis said...

These are not the same shot for starters. The raw shot looks more contrasty and a little more yellow. Was the sun out more? I'm not familiar with your camera. Can you save a raw + jpeg? That would give you something to directly compare.

I use both Aperture and Camera Raw/Photoshop. I'm comfortable using PS as I've studied it a lot more. Aperture is great as a cateloging and previewing tool.

Juha Haataja said...

@Dennis: You are right, I should have used RAW+JPEG to get the exactly the same scene.

But it has so far escaped me how to get the same results in Aperture as you get in JPEG when using the nostalgic film mode. (I'm preparing a posting on this.)