RAWs Are Pain In The Ass!

(Or: How I Spend My Previous Weekend)


Actually, let me start by saying that I wouldn't be sure if it's the hardware or software's, but it seemed that every time I put my machine into "multiple" multitasking mode, I ended up rebooting it. Like when I opened up two word documents, one spreadsheet, a couple of window browser (with at least half a dozen tabs each) PLUS Winamp, my machine died. It just simply shutdown itself -- just like what'd happen if you press the POWER button for like ten seconds.

For a second, I was staring at columns of numbers. The next second, the screen went blank. Blip. Just like that.

My guess is that I have insufficient RAMs in my machine, or the machine died every time the processor's temperature climb up passed the threshold, or even when the computation made some internal jam inside the circuit, or just some Windows problem that usually -- as many of us familiar with -- crashed for no apparent reason.

I tried to open only the programs I want to run at one time (no more multiple multitasking) and no other, but the machine just died out the same. But there are periods where I could just open as many Office documents as I need and a couple of browser's windows and a media player yet the machine run smoothly.

So that it was in the described condition when I finally decided to convert almost all of my RAW files into the standard JPEGs. I tried using the IrfanView to batch processed my .NEFs but when I opened up all the pictures later I lost all of the EXIF datas. Not that there is compromise to the image quality that I am aware of, but lacking of data as improtant as EXIF was just unbearable. I thought that maybe this was just IrfanView so I decided to use Picasa instead. Much to my dismay, the .NEF's conversion to .JPG result just the same, there is no EXIF data other than "Picture Taken With Picasa 2.0"! Another image editing software was used but the data was still missing after the conversion. That's when I finally decided to use the Nikon's PictureProject, the proprietary software that came in a CD within the camera's bundling package.

It turn out that after the RAW conversion to JPG format, the EXIF datas were still embedded! Hooray!

Then it was logical that I decided to make it easier for me to batch process all five hundred and fifty pictures in that one folder. In the PictureProject imported photos, I selected all the pictures and made the command to convert them into JPEGs -- in excellent quality.

That was when my machine started to mess with me again. Everytime I batch converting multiple selected photos, the machine just went flop without warning. I tried to lower down the amount of photos for conversion yet the thing just kept on shutting down. Flip, the screen went blank and the low humming of the fan stop. I started the machine again and kept lowering the number of processed photos but the machine died each time. This happened again and again untill I managed to guess that the optimal amount of photo conversion without the machine turned off is nine files.

Imagine it, hundreds upon hundreds of photos being processed in a batch of nine files. Add the factor that it took about a quarter of- to half a minutes to convert one file. Basically I ended up doing nothing because I must check the proceedings every a couple of minutes just to make sure that the machine kept on processing and not shut down.

But even after that precautios effort, the machine died a couple of times.

And after another frustrating routine of powering the machine ON again, I came to a conclusion: If RAW processing is just like this, I might as well stop saving pictures I take in RAW. This will lessen the time consumed on backing up my photos and that means I can do another project right after downloading all the pictures to be stored temporarily into the machine's harddrive storage.

That means less one step in my work-flow.

That's why I came to a conclusion that I won't be shooting in RAW format again unless I was going to spend time later on tweaking the photos THEN saving it as JPEGs! And I won't be shooting RAW if I can help it.

Because the conversion process took time and the RAW format images are two to four times as large as the JPEG's stored in drives; it can only be seen after installed additional .LIB files or plug-ins; and different type of the same brand have different format of RAWs!

Other than that reason (i.e. for later tweaking), shooting in RAW format are just causing Pain in the ass!!!

P.S.: My bottom and my back is killing me because of all the sitting and almost no excercising. Cr*p! No wonder, it took me about five hours to finish converting about nine hundred .NEF (Nikon's RAW format) files.