Better Available Light Digital Photography : How to Make the Most of Your Night and Low-light Shots

RAW-image-file capture 193

Bibble Labs offers Bibble Pro software for RAW-fi le processing and includes support for many cameras,
including the Leica R8 with Digital Modul-R, Pentax K100D and K110D, along with Lens Correction support
for the Tamron 70–300 mm f/4.0–f5.6 LD.

Suppose you’d taken a lot of photographs that needed work and

all needed the same adjustments. These programs allow you to

make the corrections to one image and then select others for a

“batch” correction. That’s right, the computer will crunch the

numbers, adjusting all, while you do something else. Images can

be cropped, tilted, converging lines straightened, vignettes added

around the edges.

None of these changes will alter your original fi le. Please reread

the previous sentence. The RAW fi le remains unchanged, much

like an original fi lm negative or transparency. It’s your digital

negative. The changes will take place when the program con-

verts the image to a format of your choice, the same way a print

appeared in the tray of developer back in the day.

It’s possible to make several different versions of your image,

saving each one as a new fi le, and again keeping the original

intact. What about obsolescence? What happens when a

camera company goes belly up or makes signifi cant changes

to its proprietary RAW-image algorithms? Adobe has provided

us with a tool called DNG Converter to ensure our imagery

against the possibility of being outdated. The digital negative,

or DNG, is a way to convert any camera manufacturer’s RAW