RAW

So I was stuck home with the flu and decided that I couldn't stay the whole damn day on the couch trying to capture those gold familiars, so took doll-photos in stead. I put Eiko's old eyes in Phoenix, since someone noted to me in Flickr that in frills, Phoenix looked like an SD Hippu. They have many similarities :) Both have blond fluffy hair, open eyes and a sweet smile. My first and last (I'm trying so hard not to say latest...) :3



And I love these Leeke eyes! They photograph so beautifully, too bad they don't fit that well into the eye sockets. I can't really psotion them to look anywhere but straight. That was why Eiko's been using urethanes.

But dDamn I love turquoise eyes... If I didn't stop myself, all my SD's would have different shades of blue-green. Actually, all my dolls but Nuu would :D Nuu definitely has chocolate brown eyes, she's not changing them for anything. But Hippu already has turquoise (anyone remember Hippu when he still had pink eyes?), as does Eiko, of course. Alex has sorta blue-green eyes, technically his eyes are a half-gradient of light mint and dark blue-purple. Fyrd has green eyes (they tint more to yellow than blue though).Yuf's Milky #44's have a range from purple to blue-green.  I'm already thinking of getting Hani black/mint eyes... Nigel has light blue, but I was this close of getting him a pair of Milky #42s that tint to green :D But yeah, Fenny is still waiting for his own silver-beige EDs.

But, enough about eyes. There's something else new about this photo. I've started to shoot photos RAW. This isn't the first shoot I've done this way, but now I can really say that I've fallen for the advantages of RAW. I've of course heard long ago, that you should never shoot with only JPEG, since it looses some image quality and burnouts can't be saved even in PS. But I've always thought it to be too much of a hassle and just tried to save my JPEGs anyway.

Now after a few shoots, I'm seeing the true advantages. My camera saves with much greater resolution with RAW than JPEG. And it shows especially with unsharp mask. Before, I had to sharpen my pictures quite a bit to get rid of the blur. Now, just a small amount really brings out iris patterns and other small details. You can see it really clearly in the picture of Nuu in the last doll-post, since her dark eyes have been really hard to capture before. Of course I've highlighted them with dodge tool, but I've never before been able to capture the iris so well!

It's also very more intuitive to edit the basic lighting settings with RAW than with the basic PS edits. And that means better photos, at least in my eye. I'm almost skipping all the special effect editing because the photos look good right after opening the RAW after light editing. But to bring out more oomph, I do it anyway.

So I encourage others to just go RAW too!