Watch out with Canon 5D Mark II smaller RAW file option

The wedding was scheduled for noon. On a sunny day, a week out from the solstice. This is the digital photography nightmare scenario.

My tactic in these circumstances is to underexpose a stop or more, to where I see in the histogram that I'm not clipping highlights. This is the opposite of what I would do under a cloudy sky, where typically the round hump of a histogram fits neatly in the middle of the graph. Then I have room to bump it to the right by overexposing a stop, and gaining all that extra shadow detail in raw processing. Under a sunny sky, the histogram resembles the bowl of an ocean with high cliffs on either shore. You get to pick just one shore to swim to.

Black shadows are less ugly than blown out highlights, and that's the direction I go. Under the new controls in raw processing, I have a life raft for those shadows in the Fill command. It's like gaining two extra stops in the shadows when used carefully. When used poorly, it looks like an entry in a Flickr HDR group pool.

I'm photographing a wedding, and I'm going to have a mountain of data at the end of the day. I decided to take advantage of the Mark II's smaller RAW file option, and generate mere 12mb files every click intead of 24mb. But I ran into a nasty consequence of that decision in my raw processing.

The shadows looked purple and noisy when I lifted them. Then I noticed that my second camera body, the old 5D, didn't have that problem. So I ran a test, visible here. In any setting other than full size, you get ugly, noisy purples. It's the worst at the intermediate RAW1 setting.

My advice now—never, ever use the smaller RAW file settings on the Mark II. Your shadows will thank you.

Comments

[David Adam Edelstein]

That is news I can use. Dang.

Have you done any experimentation with the highlight tone priority toggle? (did you already post about this? suddenly I'm not sure)

I've used it a bit and it seems to give unpredictable results in the shadows, and sometimes up into the near-shadow areas: lots and lots of noise and color shifts sometimes, and perfectly beautiful files sometimes.

It does produce gorgeous nuanced highlights, though, so for the right subject matter it's probably terrific -- but I'm not sure that copying Stiegletz' "Equivalences" is really a good reason to use it :-)