Cocoa Crusty

After browsing some photos on Flickr and seeing some of these interesting looking, vintage, trendy effects that people are applying to their photos, I decided to do a little research and determine how these photographers were achieving this look. I wanted it bad!

I quickly found out that these photos were shot in Camera RAW format originally and then processed after the fact. Shooting in Camera RAW basically means you take the image exactly as it was seen by the sensor without and formatting or compression. I decided to do a little messing around with this using my Canon Digital Rebel XTi.

I first had to determine how to get my camera into RAW mode. I quickly learned that you have to be using one of the manual modes, not any of the automatic modes like Full Auto, Sports, Portrait, etc. to change the quality to RAW in the menu system. Once I had this down, I set my camera to Aperture mode, chose RAW + JPG for the quality and storing option, and grabbed the tripod and my RC-1 wireless remote for my camera. It was time to do some shooting.

I stepped outside and as the sun was setting, I struggled to get a decent shot. most were blurry, inculding the one I am about to show you below. There just wasn’t enough light to make things happen. The shutter had to stay open too long and, of course, I moved making the images blurry. Just the slightest amount of movement will send an image in to a blurred frenzy. Oh wel, it at least gave me something to work with.

Once I was done shooting, I imported my photos into iPhoto as usual and then quickly found one I wanted to edit. I quickly fired up Photoshop CS2 (this link points to the latest version of Photoshop, which at the time of this writing is CS3). Once I opened one of the RAW images, I had a ton of settings to play with. You can get some interesting effects and probably even make a lot of corrections to things you didn’t notice during the shoot. Anyway, my first attempt at making a “trendy” photo is below:

Click on the above image for more information and larger versions.

I have a lot to learn and have purchased the UNDERGROUND set list RAW which has a lot of presets for doing really cool processing of RAW images but I haven’t received it yet. Anyway, maybe when I get those presets, I’ll be able to do even more nifty things with my RAW photos…

until next time…

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4 Responses to “Cocoa Crusty Gets RAW!”

1. chris Says:
   November 1st, 2007 at 8:24 AM

   really, really, nice effects on the picture! btw, you look like you just got out of prison!

   From using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Windows XP

2. Cocoa Crusty Says:
   November 1st, 2007 at 8:52 AM

   I just got off work… Stressed out, but not in prison!

   Thanks for the props on the effects!

   Cocoa

   From using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Windows XP

3. Cocoa Crusty » Blog Archive » RAW Processing for Trendy Original Shots Says:
   November 3rd, 2007 at 4:32 PM

   [...] posted the other day on my first attempts of post processing images that are taken in RAW format. I took some self [...]

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4. Troy James Says:
   November 5th, 2007 at 8:31 AM

   I like that shot…very nice effect! Potential album cover!…IMO

   From using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9 on Windows XP

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