Well FINALLY. Let me repeat this. Well FINALLY. Adobe got their heads out of their butts and FINALLY revised their RAW con­ver­sion engine from the ground up to FINALLY provide some decent raw con­ver­sion res­ults, espe­cially for images taken with Sony D-​SLRs.

What’s a RAW? Just quickly, it’s basic­ally just the very raw, unaltered data cap­tured by the camera’s sensor, more or less dir­ectly dumped into a file with (hope­fully) zero pro­cessing done in-​camera. This means that it’s actu­ally not an image, but really just pure data. Just num­bers. These num­bers need to be con­ver­ted later, on the com­puter, into an actual image before you can actu­ally see any­thing. Thus the qual­ity of the final image depends to a large part on the soft­ware used (and less so — to some extend — on the cam­era and its pro­cessing cap­ab­il­it­ies).

Since I shoot 100% of my pic­tures in RAW, it is cru­cial for me to have a soft­ware that does a good job at con­vert­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, so far Adobe’s Cam­era Raw, which does this job in Light­Room (a beau­ti­ful piece of soft­ware in itself), has done it very badly for Sony RAW files (for a num­ber of reason I won’t get into). In any case, this has rad­ic­ally changed with the Light­Room 3 (beta) that was released a couple of weeks back.

Here’s an excerpt of an image that I had to take at ISO 6400 to get short shut­ter speeds so I could cap­ture the tor­ren­tial rain. Left: Light­Room 2, Right: Light­Room 3 (beta). Check out the dif­fer­ence in how the col­our noise is removed beau­ti­fully, to actu­ally reveal that it was indeed rain­ing quite heav­ily. Also, there’s gen­er­ally much more detail in the image on the right. So I can’t wait for the full ver­sion to come out.

Ireland’s a gen­er­ally rainy place, we all know this. But every now and then — even in autumn — you get a few hours of sun­shine (if you’re lucky).

And so, yes­ter­day, we went for a stroll (the three of us now) around Maynooth to profit from this short win­dow of good weather (which, in the end, only las­ted about 4 hours). Of course we went through the beau­ti­ful Sound Cam­pus of the uni­ver­sity, just because it’s so pretty in sun­shine. This took us past this mag­ni­fi­cent, incred­ibly strongly col­our tree right out­side St. Patrick’s House.

See­ing the blue sky, I also grabbed a polar­ising fil­ter when we left, which then allowed me to really bring out those col­ours. They turned out so intense, that the pic­ture as seen here in a browser (due to the rel­at­ively small gamut of the sRGB col­our space) can­not render the actual sat­ur­a­tion of the colours!