RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

Karmaschinken

198

« on: 26 / July / 2013, 04:05:12 »

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Hello, I am driving a camera array with 50 of them to achieve the so called bullet-time effect, and I am making a project with them this weekend: Project

Now I have a question regarding RAW on my Canon SX200IS. Even having brightest sunlight this weekend I will shoot the whole day at ISO 400, to achieve shortest possible exposure times. I wil have water in the set and fast moving people and so on, to freeze them, I need exposure times at around 1/1000 or even shorter.

The 50 cameras will shoot the shole day every 15 seconds, resulting in about 4800 frames per camera. Then the 16GB cards will be filled.

Now I wonder if there is any RAW-development-feature of CHDK I could involve, that would result in JPG images but better ones than delivered by the Canon system?

I mean, is there a way to let CHDK develop the JPGs but without saving the RAWs? I am NOT running a script on the cameras while shooting.

Or, if that doesn´t work, does anyone have an idea how to increase image quality? Are there any CHDK-features that would make an ISO 400 image developed by Canon look better?

Thanks! Martin.

(BTW.: Sorry for asking here without having done own researches, I am in that much work with my project...)

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blackhole

942
A590IS 101b

Re: RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

« Reply #1 on: 26 / July / 2013, 06:17:26 »

Quote

Now I wonder if there is any RAW-development-feature of CHDK I could involve, that would result in JPG images but better ones than delivered by the Canon system?

CHDK can't do it for you.

Quote

Or, if that doesn´t work, does anyone have an idea how to increase image quality? Are there any CHDK-features that would make an ISO 400 image developed by Canon look better?

You need to get a good photo editing program like Photoshop or something like that and you must have skills to image processing. If you want the picture looks better than ones produced by Canon, you need a lot of skill, there is no easy solution to this, Canon is doing its job very well.
Postprocessing 240.000 images will require a lot of time.

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http://astrofoto.pondi.hr

waterwingz

12140

Re: RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

« Reply #2 on: 26 / July / 2013, 07:50:07 »

Quote from: Karmaschinken on 26 / July / 2013, 04:05:12

Hello, I am driving a camera array with 50 of them to achieve the so called bullet-time effect, and I am making a project with them this weekend: Project
The 50 cameras will shoot the shole day every 15 seconds, resulting in about 4800 frames per camera. Then the 16GB cards will be filled.

I know you have no time left, (after 2.5 years of work : first post) but I hope that you have figured out how to fire all 50 cameras at exactly the same time to achieve the effects shown on the liink you posted ? And that if you have the hardware, you know how to setup CHDK on each camera to get the required picture sync?

Update : never mind - found this on your website :

« Last Edit: 26 / July / 2013, 08:03:29 by waterwingz »

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Karmaschinken

198

Re: RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

« Reply #3 on: 26 / July / 2013, 16:11:14 »

Quote

You need to get a good photo editing program like Photoshop or something like that and you must have skills to image processing. If you want the picture looks better than ones produced by Canon, you need a lot of skill, there is no easy solution to this, Canon is doing its job very well.
Postprocessing 240.000 images will require a lot of time.

If the basics are bad Photoshop won´t make it good. Of course I di postprocessing, but nevertheless it is always good to get the best shots from the cams.

Quote

Update : never mind - found this on your website...

Have you seen the stuff I made with the firepainter?

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reyalp

14118

Re: RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

« Reply #4 on: 27 / July / 2013, 01:19:35 »

Quote from: Karmaschinken on 26 / July / 2013, 04:05:12

Now I wonder if there is any RAW-development-feature of CHDK I could involve, that would result in JPG images but better ones than delivered by the Canon system?

In a word: No.

Raw develop requires a raw on the card. It works by replacing the actual raw data with the saved data in an otherwise normal shot, so there's no way you could do it at the same time as the original shot.

It also uses Canon's own jpeg processing, so there's not much you could do to make a "better" image. I guess you could shoot at high ISO, then develop at low ISO to avoid Canon noise reduction, but for that to be a benefit, you'd to do better noise reduction in post-processing. That's a pretty tall order if you are starting from jpeg.

The only other place I can think of where CHDK can make a marginal improvement is enabling "super fine" jpeg quality on cameras that don't offer it in the UI. The quality improvement is very modest and the file size goes up significantly. It looks like sx200 does NOT have superfine, so this might be worth doing, but it can have side effects if free RAM is low (possibly including corrupted images), so be sure you've tested it before you commit your entire project to it!

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lapser

1093

Re: RAW development without the RAW or increasing image quality at ISO 400

« Reply #5 on: 27 / July / 2013, 16:11:21 »

The only thing I can think of where CHDK might help is that you could use the ISO to set the exposure rather than the shutter speed. That way you could get the minimum ISO for a shutter speed of 1/1000. CHDK can set ISO in 1/96 ev increments (sv96), where the camera can usually only do 1/3 ev increments.

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