5D Mark III : what RAW retains from ALO, LENR, NR, etc. ?

[Yoms]

Hello,

I could not find this in the manual and would appreciate your help to clarify these points.

1) Could you tell me among these which are applied to the RAW captured data or just present as metadata (like WB setting for instance) ?

- Auto Lighting Optimizer

- Peripheral illumination

- Chromatic aberration

- Long exposure noise reduction

- High ISO speed NR (well, this one is definitely NOT in RAW)

- Highlight Tone Priority

2) When activated, are these settings applied to the JPEG displayed on the rear LCD when reviewing pictures ?

3) When activated, are these settings applied to the JPEG embedded in the RAW file ?

4) Am I wrong or distortion correction can only be applied when processing RAW to JPEG in camera and not when capturing the image ?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Cheers,

Yoms

[hsbn · Accepted solution]

1) None of them applied to RAW; so when you view your image in Lightroom or other third party software, you cannot see those effects. Except: Long Exposure Noise Reduction DOES applied to RAW.
2) YES, you can see it on the LCD. Also the histogram will be based on JPEG. Thus, it can throw off your "real" exposure when viewing the image later in 3rd party software. Most people complained that the histogram is not accurate and the photo is darker than it shows.
3)Yes.
4)Lens correction is not applied to RAW.
So if you capture RAW only and use software other than DPP, I suggest you turn off all of those settings. Even if you use DPP, you can turn it on inside the software. You don't have to enable it on the camera unless you take RAW+JPEG and plan to use the JPEG.

[hsbn · Accepted solution]

1) None of them applied to RAW; so when you view your image in Lightroom or other third party software, you cannot see those effects. Except: Long Exposure Noise Reduction DOES applied to RAW.
2) YES, you can see it on the LCD. Also the histogram will be based on JPEG. Thus, it can throw off your "real" exposure when viewing the image later in 3rd party software. Most people complained that the histogram is not accurate and the photo is darker than it shows.
3)Yes.
4)Lens correction is not applied to RAW.
So if you capture RAW only and use software other than DPP, I suggest you turn off all of those settings. Even if you use DPP, you can turn it on inside the software. You don't have to enable it on the camera unless you take RAW+JPEG and plan to use the JPEG.

[Yoms]

Thank you, but HTP is the other exception, no ? I plan to use the embedded JPEG for a preliminary use, so I would indeed like that those settings are applied to it...

[hsbn · Accepted solution]

In short, with HTP, the camera purposely underexposes your RAW image to reserve the highlight detail. Then the camera software will boost up the exposure to the supposed-to-be-correct one (without blowing out the high light). So you'll get a nice and well exposured image on the LCD and in the JPEG file. The histogram will be "perfect" too.

However, later when you copy your RAW files down into the computer and use third party software to process your raw, you will get an underexposure raw file. Third party software cannot see the "boost" that camera has applied to your RAW.

People often wonder why their photo look good in camera and they have checked the histogram also. Yet, their photo comes out underexposure. So with this in mind, you can turn on HTP and work with the  JPEG. If you need to use the RAW file, just remember it will be underexpsoure. One more point, since HTP boost expsoure from underexposed image you'll see more noise and lost some tonal in the shadow area.

[Yoms]

Ok I understand what you mean.
Thanks for your contribution. Btw, is there a white paper or something where you got all this, because it´s not really clear in the manual...

[hsbn]

I don't recall any white paper. But I ran into this problem before and it drove me crazy. A lot of folks in Lightroom forum helped me out. I did some testing (nothing scientific) also. The manual I think does talk briefly about this.