Nice shot Graeme (and great catch with the aurora- very jealous)
A little constructive feedback if you don't mind. 30 seconds is a tad too long for an 18mm focal length on a crop sensor camera. The stars are elongated a bit too much due to this. If you drop your shutter speed down to 20 seconds you will get much tighter stars. If you can get your hands on say a 10mm lens on a crop camera then you can easily go 30 seconds without noticeable trailing. Colour looks good to my eye, but as you are possibly aware I prefer my nightscapes to have a sort of blue/black feel to them. Others prefer a warmer colour temperature. Each to their own really. Following on from Jo's comment below, the reason that Jpegs straight out of the camera tend to look better than a RAW straight out of the camera, is that the camera has generally automatically done some level of noise reduction, colour saturation, sharpening, etc. to the image. The reason RAW files do not have any of this done is because they are just that- raw files. They have not been "cooked." They contain all the data that you have collected and it has not been manipulated in anyway. So if you can not be bothered much with image processing then go with Jpegs, but you lose a lot of quality as the camera compresses the image and if you are not one hundred percent happy with the colour the camera spits out it is harder to correct later. With a RAW file however, yes you do need to manually apply some level of noise reduction, lens correction, sharpening, saturation, etc yourself, but the big advantage is you have so much more data to work with and all adjustments are very quick in a program like LR or Adobe Camera RAW or Digital Photo Professional, and completely reversible without loss of quality. If you are not happy with the colour of the raw file just move the white balance slider to suit your taste. Want a bit more detail in the foreground? Bump up the shadows slider.
Every time you open and edit a Jpeg file the image gets compressed even further. This isn't so much of a problem if all you ever plan to do with the image is put it on the web at say 900 pixels wide or print a 6x4 of it, but if you are like me and get prints done in the 30 to 40 inch range then preserving quality is key.
So if you want my advice, stick to RAW processing for at least those special shots, or if memory and storage isn't an issue why not shoot both RAW + Jpeg. That way you can have the best of both worlds. Lightroom will come to you. It is all about practice. I'm still learning how to use it all. I watched a heap of online video tutorials on how to do certain things in LR before I even started using the program.
One final point- if you do shoot just RAW don't make the mistake of just doing nothing and exporting to jpeg straight away. As I mentioned above, RAW files will always need some level of at least sharpening, contrast and saturation. Don't go crazy with the sliders though. It is often just a few percent
Keep up the good work- What is going to be your new camera by the way?
Cheers
Greg
Quote:
Originally Posted by nebulosity.
Jpeg's are the way to go, and for pano's RAW's are good.
In single shots, the CA, noise, lens distortions, ect, are more prominent, and by shooting Jpeg most of these problems are fixed. Colours do suffer a bit but can be fixed up easily.
In pano's on the other hand, these problems aren't as noticeable.
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