Hello again, sorry for the delay in getting a new post out to you. I’ve been a bit caught up lately with work and life in general, and simply haven’t been able to get a post together until now. That’s OK though, I’ve got something interesting to share that maybe you didn’t know about.
Recently, I’ve been playing around with my wife’s P&S camera, a little Canon SD1100 IS. Nice camera for what it is, and it serves her well, but image quality has some real bugaboos in it that I just don’t like — mainly crappy .jpg artifacting and heavy-handed noise reduction. Unfortunately, it being your typical $200 P&S, there’s not much I can do about that, right? Hmmmm . . . Wrong! Turns out there is a nifty and FREE way to get my little SD1100 to spit out RAW images just ripe for the picking: CHDK. So what is CHDK? It’s an open-source firmware hack that’s available for a large number of Canon P&S and bridge cams, and though a little bit arcane in how it goes about its business, it gets the job done and opens up a whole new world of abilities for even the most basic cams out there. To start, here’s the link to the HP: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK From there, you can read up to see if you’re cam is supported and then how to get CHDK up and running on it. Best part is, CHDK is just a program that’s installed on your cam’s memory card, so there’s no chance of messing up your cam in any way. Don’t like CHDK once you’ve tried it? Just format the card and you’re back to normal again, with no hassels.
Now, if you’ve already gone and had a look at CHDK’s website, you’ll see that it offers a lot more than just RAW capability, but RAW was the only thing I cared about, so it’s all I’m going to mention here. CHDK’s RAW setup normally generates .CRW files. That’s fine, but I can’t open them in Lightroom 2 as is, so I used the option to save them as .DNG files, which LR2 loves. Once in LR2, I just edit them same as any other RAW file, and the results are quite pleasing. Here’s an example, ISO 100, stock .jpg on the left and untouched RAW on the right. I should mention that the .jpg is at the highest quality as well:
(click for full-size)
First thing to notice is the .jpg and noise reduction artifacting in the .jpg file. It’s the highest quality from the camera available, but it looks ass. Color rendition between the two is similar, but the RAW file is a bit more saturated overall. In looking at other files I’ve found that under certain conditions, the RAW files’ color can get pretty wonky (super saturated reds and yellows in certain lighting), but that’s probably because LR2 was never tuned for a Canon P&S, so if you really want to use RAW, you’re going to need to eventually do a calibration for the camera to get the colors in step where they should be. I’ve not tried other converter’s yet, so not sure if they behave the same.
One other thing to notice is that the RAW is fairly soft compared to the stock .jpg. That’s seems a natural since I’m sure the stock camera settings pump up the sharpening to give shots that POP that people like so much. Still, even though it’s soft, you can see immediately there’s more fine detail in the tree limbs, roof shingles, etc., and none of the crappy compession and noise artifacts. So now how would it look with some shapening and noise reduction added? Here’s another sample with the same .jpg, but the RAW processed w/ sharpening and Noise Ninja applied as well. The result is really like night and day compared to the stock .jpg, and this is why you should go out and give CHDK a try for yourself — it makes most Canon P&S’s seem like real cameras now!
