Canon EOS 1D Mark III-1682

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Announced yesterday after much speculation, Canon released a firmware update to its new professional series camera, the Mark III. The word from a number of vocal internet forum writers/whiners is that it hasn’t fixed their specific, AI-Servo Auto Focus problems, it has improved the one thing that I know for sure bugs me about the camera.

The new LCD on the back of the camera is bright and huge. It’s now 3″ across, an upgrade from the 2.5″ screens on the latest crop of DSLRs, but it’s still using the same number of pixels. 230,000 of them to be precise.

The screen’s size has proven to be very helpful already as you can usually get a good sense of composition, proportion and general colour rendition on it, than I ever had with the tiny 1.8″ screen I was used to using on my D70. Another benefit from it is the fact that I can now share and review the images with my clients (or my mates) easily.

The problem with the new LCD though is something that requires getting into file formats, and the inherent differences between JPEGs and RAW files.

Are you sitting down? Then I’ll begin.

RAW, which is the generic term, is as close as one can get to a ‘negative’ when shooting with film. Similar to film negatives, it needs to be developed before it can be viewed, but it has the greatest amount of information available from that camera. Annoyingly, a different type of RAW image is typically created by each camera manufacturer. Canon’s is sometimes called, CRW or CR2. Nikon’s is NEF*. Annoying.

JPEG, the most common file format of all, is the equivalent of shooting a Polaroid and as such, are viewable immediately without any processing.

Conveniently enough, many DSLRs have been the ability to shoot, ‘film negatives’ (RAW) and ‘Polaroids’ (JPEG) sometimes even at the same time (RAW + JPEG).

Um ok. So what?

Well the point is that while RAW files require more work to be viewed straight away, they usually reveal their true value when it comes to processing and manipulating them in Lightroom/Photoshop. The RAW file contains all the data that the camera’s sensor was able to capture with little to no ‘artificial flavouring’ applied to them. The most common flavours that get added to a JPEG is sharpness, saturation, contrast, colour space. “Sharpness”, literally pertains to how ‘sharp’ an image looks. While this can’t make an image that’s plain out of focus, back into focus, it can give images a certain crispness that very sought after in this day and age.

RAW files are unflavoured, untreated, and on the whole untouched. Which means that they often look a little soft, unsaturated and kinda dull, when they come straight off the memory card. But this is exactly what photographers want! Since the RAW file is so free of any manipulation, one can really go into the file and add the appropriate amount of saturation, contrast, sharpness and even adjust exposure. Since RAW files don’t have these setting baked into the file, they give photographers a great deal of latitude in how their images should be interpreted.

So… how does all this come into play with this little piece of firmware released for my new camera?

Well, the LCD on the back of the camera is obviously able to display the images that were just taken on the camera, right? Well yes, but the LCD is also able to show you the difference between an image shot in RAW or JPEG. This translates into your JPEG images looking sharp and in focus, while your RAW files look soft and out of focus when they’re in fact in focus. Annoying! Apparently, the new firmware will apply an extra amount of ‘sharpness’ to the RAW files when they’re viewed on the LCD which should alleviate some of the anxiety that I experienced shooting in the field.

The first few hundred frames that I viewed on the LCD really gave me the spooks as I couldn’t tell if I’d hit critical or not. I was starting to wonder if I’d just bought a $4500 Holga. Thankfully, when I reviewed the shots on my laptop, everything looked sharp, crisp and in focus.

I will update my firmware in the next day or so and report back.

*In an effort to bring about some order to the 100+ RAW formats knocking around out there, Adobe systems, is encouraging photographers and camera manufacturers to come towards a common RAW format. Adobe’s attempt a creating a single, universally readable RAW format is DNG, or Adobe Digital Negative.