Two more Tech Questions please

1. The help explanation of the Restore(3), etc. functions in the Raw Converter is a bit cryptic. Do you have a document with a more detailed explanation that you can post? Specifically,

Does the Restore function shift the entire exposure down or does it compress the restored highlights within the lighter regions of the image? Does it also attempt to use unclipped colors to reconstruct the clipped color? It is hard to create images to test something like a highlight function but it appears from the histogram on at least one image that had blown highlights that the entire exposure was being reduced and the resulting sky color was destroyed. Am I doing something wrong? All I did was change Highlights from clip to Restore(3).

2. Is there a menu item that will sort thumbnails by ISO? I would like to batch process images on the basis of ISO range.

Thanks,
Werner

BTW, because of your help yesterday I am completely comfortable that PhotoPerfect will do what I want so I am now a happy payed-up customer.

Although I do not have any 'official' documents on hand, I would be glad to share my experience. Hope this will help a bit.

On contrary to JPEG files, RAW files contains much more headroom, that means that you can 'rescue' a much more severe exposed RAW file than a JPEG files. How much ??? This depends on the capability of your camera and of your RAW converter. For example I can safely salvage up to 3 stops on a under- or overexposed RAW file of my Canon DSLRs.

As you have already found out, the 'Restore' function applies an other tone curve to your RAW file, in order to rescue/restore the highlight clipped/ignored by the default tone curve/conversion. Due to this new tone curve, the overall luminance of your picture will change = it appears darker and mostly also less contrasty- You can counter that by increasing the brightness and contrast levels.

A digital image consists of 3 color channels: Red, Green, Blue = RGB. Normally if one of these channel is blowna a certain point, the raw converter clips the data of the other 2 channels at that point as well ( = default mode of the highlight mode) By using restore, the raw converter also reads the data of the other 2 channels and applies the tone of the adjacent non blown area to the blown one and uses these information to rescue the blown area.
The higher value (3-9) is used for the 'Restore' function, the more blown areas should be rescued.

So far the theory. The more data is available in the other 2 non blown channels, the better a raw converter can rescue the highlights. Unfortunately there are a lot of cases where the saturation points of the camera and of the raw converter are mismatched when using the 'Restore' mode. The colors of the highlights area will be distorted. Mostly you will see a magenta cast. In this case, please activate the 'saturation point' option and enter a value (0-4096 for 12-bit cameras; 0 -16384 for 14 bit cameras like the newer Canon, Nikon DSLRs,e.g. 40D, 5D Mk II etc...)


I assume that you encountered such saturation points mismatch mentioned above. Please use the saturation point option starting at about 4000 (for 14 bit camera) or 1000 (for a 12 bit camara) and work your way up until the sky is normal again. As I'm lacking experience with Panasonic RAW files, I cannot tell the exact value here. If we can somehow get our hands on that RAW file, well then it's another story ;-)


No currently this option is not available, but it should not be that difficut to implement within another version, as sorting the images to an EXIF field/value is possible.


Wow, this is really a nice feedback, probably the best possible a support/company can get :-). Many thanks!
Best regards

Hoang-Tran

BTW...Due to our current workload, probably we cannot provide you with the promised batch file prior Friday. Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding.

That's the part I missed. I'll go back and try the blown image again and use the saturation point option. I'm not yet sure how many bits the FZ35 is but I'll find out.

No worries Hoang-Tran, I'm not planning any 1000-image photography trips until the Fall.

Thanks again
Werner