The fact that I just got around to processing some photos from a trip to Glenwood Caverns over a month ago illustrates the problem with shooting snapshots in RAW. Sure, I could have batch processed them with Capture NX and uploaded the JPEGs right away, but I new these photos would need some work. The conditions were far from ideal. We were in a large tour group, several hundred feet inside a dripping wet mountain, and the wet, reflective surface wasn’t cooperating with my attempts to light things up with my SB-800. I was anxious to get some decent shots because I had visited these caves a year ago with a point-and-shoot Pentax Optio, and the photos were worthless. Too bad, because it was dry on my first trip and we were a small group.

This time, with my D70 and SB-800 Speedlight, I got much more usable shots. I still wouldn’t call them anything more than snapshots because I had little time to frame the photos or stabilize the camera with the large group and big drops of water coming off the ceiling of the cave. It was my choice to shoot in RAW that saved these photos though. With the bright flash and the deep cave, I had shots that were heavily exposed in the foreground, but quickly faded to dark shadow with no detail, just as the photo below shows.

f/4.2 at 1/60th of a second. ISO 200 with SB-800 iTTL BL exposure

Sure, I could have boosted the ISO, but I was trying to avoid noise in the photos, and it was too wet in there to have my camera uncovered for any length of time to change settings. Instead, I hoped I would be able to recover detail when I got home, and my hopes were not in vain.

The photo below was processed in Aperture. The one above is a JPEG export before doing any RAW processing. For the final photo, I increased the exposure by a third of a stop and boosted the shadows and highlights sliders to recover details in both. I then boosted the mid-tone contrast a bit to recover it from those edits and boosted the saturation in the reds and the yellows just a little. I finished by applying a subtle edge sharpening to crisp up the foreground.

Same photo, after some adjusting

This is a much better snapshot now and it shows the real depth of this amazing room of the cave that the first version could never communicate to someone who wasn’t there. I couldn’t get this kind of detail out of my bad JPEGs from last year’s photos with the Optio. Sure, the SB-800 made quite a difference in lighting, but if I had shot in JPEG, I never would have recovered this kind of detail out of the shadows from my D70 shots either.

End result, I will keep shooting my snapshots in RAW. I could always batch process them with the in-camera settings with little extra time, but I like having the ability to fix the bad images. No matter how much time I try to devote to “serious photography,” most of the photos I take are what I consider snapshots, even if I use aperture priority and a nice camera. These are the photos I use to capture memories and it is worth the extra effort to get them in the best form possible.

You can view the full photo album of the cave snapshots here.

tags: post-processing | technique