A presentation on digital capture

In about two weeks, I’ll be participating in a workshop on raw processing. The workshop, sponsored by the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, brings together three developers of raw developing software (Eric Chan from Adobe, Brian Griffith from Irident Digital, and Lionel Kuhlmann from Capture One) and two photographers (Charles Cramer and myself). The workshop will be moderated by Rex Naden, and will take place in Menlo Park, CA.

The premise of the endeavor is that photographers are best served by their tools if they understand them well, and that the present generation of raw developers is less transparent in operation than more traditional image editing software. A specific concern is that there are many operations that can be performed both in the raw developer and in an image editor like Photoshop, and photographers could use some help deciding which operations to do in which type of program.

The CPA put on a similar workshop a couple of years ago, which was quite successful. That workshop began with an excellent explanation of some of the technical aspects of digital photography given by Mike Collette of Betterlight. Rex has asked me to take on that task, and I have prepared a set of slides covering how a digital camera works and strategies for determining exposure, with emphasis on ETTR, UniWB, Unity Gain ISO, and raw file inspection.

Here’s a copy of the current draft of the presentation.

Although you can’t tell what I’d say about the slides by looking at them, if you’ve been reading this blog a while, you can probably guess fairly accurately. I post the slides to teach and to learn. The teaching part is allowing anyone who cares to the opportunity to see my current thinking on some topics that have been previously presented here in half-baked form. The learning part is getting feedback from all of you who look at it and feel moved to comment.

Thanks!

Jim