Today was another sunny day and I went photographing at around noon. This is not what people call “good light”, but it’s plenty of light for the camera, and I wanted to see what kind of quality I can get when I’m not always forced into higher ISOs.
It’s a mixed bag. For this particular image I have the feeling that its quality has been improved by working from RAW. It’s not free of noise, but it has excellent detail, rich colors, I got rid of the effects of haze nicely, so basically I’m perfectly satisfied.
This is not a general rule though. For some images Panasonic’s JPEG engine produces fairly nice images, and when I try to reproduce them from RAW (for instance because I want to fiddle with white balance) I fail. What I mean by fail is, that I smudge too much away with noise reduction, introduce too much noise by sharpening, and that in the end my result is noticeably worse than the JPEG straight from the camera. Of course this is disturbing and for me it is an indication that I’m always working on the edge. Image quality of the FZ-150 is fairly good, the camera’s JPEG engine is nothing short of impressive, but when you fiddle with the images, the smallest mistake is enough to make the image fall apart.
April asked me in a comment if the images are “print quality” and I confidently answered yes, but I really should note that the slightly lower quality, although probably not visible in prints, might prevent certain kinds of manipulations in Photoshop.
The Song of the Day is “Quiet Moments” from Chris De Burgh’s 1979 album “Crusader”. Hear it on YouTube.
Update: I’ve re-worked the colors and added some more contrast.