A compelling reason to shoot RAW?

[pierces]

Adobe just announced a new technology being added to Photoshop, Lightroom and Camera RAW that uses an AI process to demosaic RAW images at the pixel level. Demosaicing is the process that takes the red, green and blue pixel pattern (Bayer array), measures the light levels of adjoining and nearby pixels and calculates the average color of the part of the image that spanned those pixels. All cameras and RAW conversion do this to produce a viewable image from all those pretty colors from what is basically an RGB checkerboard. While the process works great on large areas, it gets a tiny bit sloppy on fine details.

 

An old illustration from one of my articles:

 

What the new process does is use an AI to do amore exacting computation of the probable color that the individual pixels represent. Sort of like using a smaller brush to paint in the details. Improved calculating of the averages is part of what has made modern out-of-camera JPEGs so much better than earlier days but this is supposedly a step beyond that.They claim a 30% improvement in fine details and I have no idea what objective method they might have used to get that number, but it sounds like it's worth a look.

 

 

Dave

 

Edited February 12, 2019 by pierces

[pierces]

Well, I spent a hour or so reprocessing some recent images and the results were amazing...

 

...ly underwhelming. The changes in detail are virtually invisible at any zoom level under 200% and even then, you have to flick back and forth between before and after to ID where it made a difference. 

 

It might be different with other brands of sensors and perhaps on higher-res images than the 24MP files I was working. For now, I have not found this feature a compelling reason to shoot RAW all of the time. 

 

The other thing I found disquieting is the tripling or quadrupling of the file size. 

 

IMHO, not a game-changer. It is another tool in the box that may, like many before it, become significant in future releases.

 

Dave

[spthealien]

Same experience here with the Adobe processing. It's not noticeable unless I zoom in significantly. If I printed more murals, it might be cool (for me), but clients likely won't even notice.

 

That being said, since I revisit my images as software processing improves, I always shoot RAW. It's amazing how much cleaner the same files I have shot a decade ago come out now. Better noise control and grain handling. Not to mention the newer Adobe profiles.

[masterdrago]

I recently purchased Adobe Photoshop and Premiere and I saw where they were going on and on about that new technology. I was wondering what more curves they were going to throw at me as I try to learn the latest (been using PS6 a bit over the last 15 years). Also used Capture NX and more recently Affinity Photo. I've recently started to try to learn movie editing with GoPro Studio but will begin using Premiere. Adobe stuff sure is complicated.

[Loonbeam]

Been playing with it as well.  At the Macro level it has some utility (it did a really nice job on some flower petal edges, but unless you are really playing close up, I don't see the value..yet.  As their AI systems mature....