82 Technical Issues: Killing the Gremlins
when the shot was taken, and all other data were discarded—so major
white balance changes are impossible to make without serious image
degradation.
White balance is vitally important if your shot is to look like
the original scene. You can choose a white balance setting in
your camera (sunny, cloudy, fl ash, tungsten light, etc.), or you
can leave it on “auto” and let the camera guess the right balance.
Most of the time, the camera guesses pretty well. However, if it
gets it wrong, with raw it’s not a problem; adjust it later. As all
the data are in the fi le, all you are seeing is a preview. With a
JPEG fi le, your adjustment options are limited as so much of the
original data have been thrown away.
“But I don’t have raw!” some will say. All is not lost. Make sure
your camera is set to save in the highest JPEG format. This will be
called “super fi ne,” “super high quality,” or a similar name. Check
your handbook for the right title.
If your camera does not support raw format, and most compacts
do not, don’t panic. JPEGs have some advantages. The fi les are smaller,
and JPEGs are a universally recognized format that can be opened in
any image editor or viewed using, say, a Web browser. They are
ubiquitous in the extreme. You just have to be that much more careful
to get the exposure and white balance right in camera.16-bit Manipulation
Wherever possible, keep your photos in 16 bits until you have fi nished
editing it. More data equal better results. That means outputting 16-bit
TIFFs from your raw fi le converter.
If you have a great image saved as a JPEG and you do want to
manipulate it to get the best from it—say, by changing the levels,
curves, or color balance—another trick is to convert your JPEG fi le to
a 16-bit TIFF format fi le, if your image-editing software allows it. Then
you can make the changes you want while in 16 bit. It is not as good
as starting out with a 16-bit TIFF from a converted raw fi le, but it is
better than making changes to the original 8-bit fi le. When you are
fi nished editing, convert it back to 8 bit.
Processing raw fi les is easy. Photoshop Elements and Photoshop
both come with built-in raw converters. Camera manufacturers supply
their own raw fi le decoders, and there are many third-party raw decod-
ers available that are not very expensive. My personal favorite is Silk-
ypix (www.silkypix.com), which is popular, I am told, with Japanese
pros.
Figure 5.3 shows a dramatic example of the benefi ts of manipulating
images in 16 bit. On the left is the 16-bit image after several changes