Andrew Uio

Howdy, Thanks for the replies. I didn't really mean to imply turning off things like gamma or interpolation of the bayer array. Just the more subjective settings, like the ones I mentioned: saturation, contrast, sharpness. All the prosumer cameras I've seen allow you to adjust them, but never seem to tell you what to set to get no saturation change, no contrast change, no sharpness change, etc. So I guess that is not really a RAW image. As an example of why I personally want saturation completely off is that I prefer to perform color balance in post before saturation, and saturation applied in camera apriori will be difficult to undo and mathematically will interfere with color balance across the range from lights to darks. Regarding gamma, it is obviously important for range compression in the encoding process. It would be nice if cameras would document their gamma curves they apply. I've written a lot of video filters that ungamma the image to operate in linear tone space, and I usually just have to assume that the gamma is 2.2. Regarding compression, won't you get better compression with saturation, contrast and sharpening off? All those attributes tend to "spread" the image, which hurts compression and introduces more artifacts. Another reason I would like them off in the camera, since I can easily perform them later, with much greater flexibility. I'd still be curious to hear about any prosumer cameras that are a little more clear about what is being applied and how to disable it. Cheers, Andrew

Howdy, I've often wanted to put a camera into a sort of "accurate" mode where, except for white balance, no modifications are performed to the image. No saturation changes, no sharpening (just best interpolation possible), no contrast curve, etc. Kind of a partial analog of "RAW" mode in photography, which many people find quite useful. With every camera I've ever seen, you can only control the levels of settings, but it is never clear how to disable them. For example, does the middle setting of saturation mean no modification, or does it mean adjust saturation to what consumers typically want? I'm guessing it is the later. But that fact never seems to be documented. Has anybody seen a camera where you really know what operations are being applied to the image, and can easily disable them completely? Cheers, Andrew