Shooting in RAW?

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by brad

Good points, nevyn.. also remember that just because your display is "blinking" the white areas does not mean that you blew out those areas if you are shooting in RAW. My experience wth the 10D has indicated that those areas are blinking because the white was outside of the range of the JPG thumbnail (which is what the camera is showing you on the display when you chimp), but it is not necessarily outside the range of RAW... even if you convert that image to JPG from RAW later, you still may have captured the data there.

Yep, AFAIK with all current DSLR's the histogram and highlight warnings are based on what you would get from the in-camera processing if you were shooting JPEG. This why, even though you can change things like white balance, contrast, saturation, etc in the RAW convertor later on, these settings do matter in-camera if you're judging your exposures based on the historgram or highlight warning. For this reason, it's a good idea for RAW shooters to make sure that the in-camera WB is at least "in the ballpark"; and it's also a good idea to set the in-camera contrast/tone-curve and saturation to conservative values because both those settings can push the JPEG to clipping when set aggressively.

[Nevyn]

Originally Posted by brad

also remember that just because your display is "blinking" the white areas does not mean that you blew out those areas if you are shooting in RAW

My experience has been the same - unless there are large-ish areas of blinking, you stand a chance of getting a useable image with raw. Amazing what you can recover sometimes isn't it?

Worth noting that the histogram gives a good clue to exposure, but I read somewhere that the it's based on the gamma corrected jpeg image, not the raw data, so it's for guidance, not an absolute.

Edit - Jeffkohn, you beat me to the enter button! Good points on the WB though, something that I don't often bother with although I know I should.
It does raise a question, what do you regard as conservative values for in-camera contrast/tone-curve and saturation?

[Elsaspet]

I've brought some pictures back from the dead using RAW. If I had shot JPEG I would have been toast. Start shooting RAW, and you will never stop. :-)

[jeffkohn]

Edit - Jeffkohn, you beat me to the enter button! Good points on the WB though, something that I don't often bother with although I know I should.
It does raise a question, what do you regard as conservative values for in-camera contrast/tone-curve and saturation?

I shoot Nikon, which means I can choose from predefined tone-curve or load a custom tone curve. I have a custom curve loaded that's designed to make the histogram more accurate. It produces fairly flat-looking results so it's not something you'd want to use while shooting JPEG but for my purposes it works well. For saturation I just keep it at the normal level, and I also shoot mode II color which is a bit more conservative with saturation.