Question about converting RAW...

[theuserjohnny]

Ey everyone I just have a quick question about RAW.

So for the most part I've been using my Mark II for video but I've been interested in doing timelapse with the camera. Now I'm planning to shoot in RAW so that I can have all that information but I noticed that "quicktime 7" dosen't support the CR2 format (neither dose Adobe).

So say I do my corrections in LightRoom and such and then I convert the files to .tiff or .jpeg or whatever I choose to format it toward will I lose data in that compression?

Would it just become loss-less in which even though I converted it into a different format I didn't lose any information?

Or would compressing it into the new format cause me to lose data?

Thanks in advance!

 

[snberk103]

Ey everyone I just have a quick question about RAW.

So for the most part I've been using my Mark II for video but I've been interested in doing timelapse with the camera. Now I'm planning to shoot in RAW so that I can have all that information but I noticed that "quicktime 7" dosen't support the CR2 format (neither dose Adobe).

So say I do my corrections in LightRoom and such and then I convert the files to .tiff or .jpeg or whatever I choose to format it toward will I lose data in that compression?

Would it just become loss-less in which even though I converted it into a different format I didn't lose any information?

Or would compressing it into the new format cause me to lose data?

Thanks in advance!

If Lightroom is opening the CR2 files, then that's Adobe... so I'm not following something here?

But basically.... as soon as you convert from RAW to TIFF or .JPG some of the RAW information is lost. However, the RAW file is still in Lightroom. You can also pass an image from Lightroom straight into Photoshop.... though it won't be getting the full set of data from Lightroom.

This is not actually a problem, though. At least usually. You can't actually "see" the complete RAW image anyway.... prints and monitors are not capable of displaying everything a RAW file has recorded. Even in Lightroom you are not seeing "everything" at any one moment.... you are simply seeing the portion of the data that the monitor is capable of displaying. When you "fix" an image in Lightroom you are eliminating the data that you don't need to make the image look it's best. At some point you have squeezed the image to fit the monitor, and then you export that subset of the data to a TIFF, PSD, JPG or something. This is a huge simplification to make an analogy...but basically I think it's more or less accurate.

Does that help?

 

[OreoCookie]

If you stick to a Lightroom-Photoshop-based workflow, granted that Lightroom and Photoshop use the same version of the RAW converter, your whole workflow will be lossless. If you write »Adobe does not support .cr2«, I assume you have an old version of Photoshop installed, but a newer version of Lightroom.

.cr2 is the file suffix of all Canon RAW files, but the RAW converter needs to support each model separately. So if your version of Photoshop came out long before the (5D?) Mark II was released, then the version of the RAW converter that came with Adobe Photoshop cannot read RAW files of your 5D Mark II. Lightroom, on the other hand, uses a newer version of the RAW converter (since you can view the RAW files with Lightroom), and it opens just fine.

If you update Lightroom and Photoshop in lockstep, they will open the RAW file which you edited in Lightroom in Aperture, and Photoshop uses the same RAW converter to process the image with the same settings and edits. After you're done tinkering with the image in Photoshop, Lightroom, on the other hand, can read all changes made by Photoshop.

If you don't want to shell out money for a new version of Photoshop, you must render the RAW file (preferably as a 16 bit tiff) and then edit it in Photoshop. Any rendering implies that there is a loss in information, although that doesn't mean you will be able to see it. If you do all the necessary rough edits in Lightroom (adjust exposure, brighten or darken certain areas of the image, etc.), there will be nothing to worry about since the biggest advantage using RAW files is that you can pull information out of the shadows and highlights.

 

[theuserjohnny]

My bad with my wording I guess when I meant to say "adobe" I meant I can't open the CR2 file in "Adobe Premere Pro".

Because what I do for the timelapse is that I can open the image sequence in either "quicktime pro 7" or "premere pro" but the problem is that neither read the CR2 file.

The main reason why I want to use RAW is so that I can fix any imbalances toward my exposure, fix temperature color, etc.

So once I make these fixes and give it a look I guess my main question is how much loss data will there be when I convert these CR2 images to tiff.

Because once I stich the photos together into a timelapse clip I plan to do color grading on "Premere Pro" to give it the specific look I'm going for.

So in short... I plan to make basic fixes to the look of the photo via LightRoom and then I plan to export it into some sort of format such as tiff or jpeg and then put the photos together to make a timelapse clip and then import that into Premere Pro and then make then color grade the footage from there to give it my specific look.

I'm sorry if this is all confusing!

 

[blanka]

Converting RAW is not the magic pill to compensate errors when clicking the button. For example: colour temperature affects light metering. If you make a picture in a way off white point, certain highlight colours will clip beyond recovery.