Losing Image quality!

[mwhitacre]

I've been shooting a lot of images w/ my canon 20d and have been going through them and saving as Tif's w/ the canon viewer utility application. But I've noticed that when I open them in photoshop that I've lost a lot of the original image quality ( loss of contrast and tonal detail) Is their a standard process I should use that correct this problem? Keep in mind that I save them at a very high resolution (300-400). and have tried higher, but that doesn't seem to help.

Any thoughts would be great,

thanks.

[Michael Fanelli]

I've been shooting a lot of images w/ my canon 20d and have been going through them and saving as Tif's w/ the canon viewer utility application. But I've noticed that when I open them in photoshop that I've lost a lot of the original image quality ( loss of contrast and tonal detail) Is their a standard process I should use that correct this problem? Keep in mind that I save them at a very high resolution (300-400). and have tried higher, but that doesn't seem to help.

This sounds like a common color management problem. Do you have your ICC profiles set up and working properly? If so, Photoshop uses ICC, maybe Canon's software does not. Does one application default to a different embedded profile? Maybe RGB for PS and sRGB for Canon or something like that? I am assuming you are using the same CRT for both applications.

FWIW, rather than TIFF, I'd save all my images as RAW+JPEG. Raw is vastly superior to TIFF for archiving and allows a lot more customization. The embedded JPG is useful for posting, email, etc.

[Photo-John]

Excellent question. First of all, I'm going to move this thread to the Digital Imaging forum because I think that's a better home for it. It's really an image processing question.

I'm not sure what your background is with digital cameras. But I'm guessing the 20D is your first digital SLR. Digital SLRs do a lot less processing on images than comapct digital cameras. Right out of the camera, image files are generally softer, and have less contrast and saturation than compact camera image files. This is to give the photographer the choice in how their images look, instead of the camera's processor. Your 20D files may not look good to you right out of the camera, but they have much more potential than what I bet you're used to. Low contrast, minimal saturation, and minimal sharpness, allow you to optimize the image to your taste, after you shoot. Another way to put it is - the image quality is your responsibility.

Most pros appreciate the softer, flatter files. It gives us ultiamte control over what our final images look like. That's why digital SLRs are designed this way. Most of us do at least some "post-processing" with Photoshop and/or other digital imaging software. I do a lot of work on my images. They look nothing like what comes out of my cameras. I consider the captured file only as raw material from which I create my final photo.

You may have heard or read the term, "workflow." You need to decide how to handle your images. You have a great camera, but it won't make great photos for you. You need to see what's in the viewfindr and make decisions about how to take pictures of things. You also need to make decisions about how to handle the files after you capture them. If you don't want to do any post-processing, you should take a look at the in-camera saturation, sharpness, and contrast controls. You can change the quality of your images with those. But keep in mind that changing those settings ultimately degrades the file quality and limits what you'll be able to do with your images in the future - especially bad exposures or other problem images.

I'm concerned about how your shooting and saving your files. You say you're converting them to TIFFs to save them? Are you shooting JPEGs or RAW files? There's really no reason to convert to TIFF to save your files, unless you've edited them in some way. And converting them to TIFFs won't increase the quality in any way. Your original file will always have the most quality and potential. If you shoot a low quality JPEG, your TIFF file will just be an uncompressed copy of that low quality JPEG. Yuur best bet is to always shoot RAW, save all of your RAW files, and then convert them as needed. If you ever edit a file, then you can save it as a TIFF. That's the only time you ever benefit from saving a large, uncompressed file.

I hope that helps. I'm sure you have more questions. It sounds like you're just getting started in the digital SLR realm. There's a lot to learn and we have a lot of knowledge to share. Please don't be afraid to ask more questions. Remember - there are no stupid questions. We all had to learn. And hopefully, we're all still learning

[mwhitacre]

[QUOTE=Photo-John]Excellent question. First of all, I'm going to move this thread to the Digital Imaging forum because I think that's a better home for it. It's really an image processing question.

I'm shooting everything in the RAW mode and convert to TIFF to edit in photoshop. I like the way the images look in the canon application, but I don't have the camera raw plugin for photoshop, so the conversion is necessary. Maybe this will take some more experimentation.

Thanks for your help!

mwhit

[Photo-John]

Sounds like you're doing it right. But Michael brings up a good point. What are your profile settings in both your camera and Photoshop? And how much do you know about color management? This is likely where the problem lies.

[JCPhoto1]

My personal opinion is the problem is the conversion to TIFF. Shoot in RAW and do as much processing with the Canon software then keep them as a RAW file when you move them to Photoshop. When your done correcting then convert them toTIFF if needed. You didn't say if you had photoshop CS. The earlier versions don't have RAW capability is far as I know. If that's the case It really would be better to do as much with the Canon software or other RAW converters that do editing.