Lessons

Lesson Info

Dual Pixel RAW Demo

Alright this is a biggie, Dual Pixel RAW so this is the first camera to have the Dual Pixel RAW and I'm gonna go through some of the details in the menu system, but we shot a couple of videos out on location, and lets just go ahead and play those videos now and then we'll go through the exact details of it. We moved inside here at Golden Gardens to shoot a portrait we wanna try to use one of the new features of this camera that we haven't seen on previous cameras it's called Dual Pixel RAW. Now, this dual pixel technology was used for enabling faster focusing in video and live view. But the Canon engineers found another way that we could tweak with the information to potentially help in a portrait type shallow depth of field situation. So what we have, is we have a portrait situation here and I'm using an 85 1.2 and I'm shooting it at 1. so we're getting really shallow depth of field. And I'm gonna photograph Jake here and I'm gonna do it incorrectly to see if I can fix it in post prod...

uction. Normally I would focused on the closest eye to me and I'm gonna focused on the furthest eye to see if I can fix that in post production. Now, one of the things about shooting in Dual Pixel RAW which is right here in the shooting menu, the second item on the list, is that we can disable it or we can enable it. First, I just wanna take a normal shot here and then I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on. Because one of the downsides of using this particular feature is the file size. And you can see our first image here under normal shooting conditions is a 30.6 megapixel image and when we turn on Dual Pixel RAW it's 57.9 megabytes so it just about doubles the size of your files which means less images on a memory card more hard drives are needed and so forth and it is gonna also slow down he shooting of the camera in some cases 'cause you can't shoot in the continuous mode. Let's go in and I'm, as I say, I'm gonna shoot this incorrectly and I'm gonna do this in live view so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put our little focusing box on Jake's far eye, this is gonna zoom in really close so we can see this and I'm gonna let the camera auto-focus 'cause it does a really good job and we can see eyelashes in there so I think we're doing pretty good. And so lets go ahead and shoot the picture and then I'm gonna double check it to make sure that this is indeed focused slightly off. And so as you can see, his left eye is in focus we can see those eyelashes really carefully and we wanna see how much we can move it because we have the near eye out of focus. Now, if we could fix this, that would be a magic bullet of photography, but we'll see when we get in post production. Alright folks, we're back in the studio and we're gonna take a look at the Dual Pixel RAW capability. So I have my portrait that I purposely shot slightly back-focused. That's the image we have on screen, we're once again using Canon's Digital Photo Professional 4 software. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in so I can get a real good look on the eye here. And you can see that I have focused on his back, or his left eye and I wanna see if I can move it a little bit. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna open up tools and start Dual Pixel RAW optimizer. Takes a moment for it to load up in there 'cause these are large files. And let's go ahead and zoom in so we can get a good look at his eye here. Now, over on the right hand side we'll have a check box for image microadjustment. So we can choose either the microadjustment the Bokeh shift, or ghosting reduction on this but right now, we're working with image microadjustment. There will be a strength indicator down here at the bottom and for those of you who are knowledgeable about sharpening in photoshop, this is very much like that or at least, somewhat like that. I'm gonna set it on 10 just so that we can see as much difference as possible in this example. And then we have a front to back slider right here. I'm gonna switch it all the way to the back and if we look at the photo while I move this how much change do you see? It's a very, very subtle change going back and forth from one extreme to the other. There is a little difference and maybe to see this difference a little bit more clearly might be easier to see this in Lightroom. I also have the images loaded up in Lightroom using their comparison tool so let me get this a little bit more full-screen. Now over on the left you have the original image. Now, this is a RAW image and it's a little bit flat and a little bit de-saturated so the color is a little bit different because I've had to export JPEG's from the Canon software. So on the left side we have the original RAW and on the right side we have it focused towards the front side. And lets go to the back and I'll go back and forth between the front and the back. Now, if you notice the out of focus eye goes way out of focus when we shift the focus backwards a little bit. The place that the camera seems to be focusing on slightly adjusts. But I think it is so small of difference that I really don't find pretty much any photographer really being able to make good use of this. I think if you take that original image and you just sharpen it a small amount it's not too much of a difference. It's a technical happenstance that they figured out that they could do this. I think they wanted to put it out there so us photographers could play around and see who could make use of it. Now, whether they can expand the range so that I could actually focus on the correct eye that would be nice in the future. It may be difficult from what I know about the sensor at this point. And so it's an interesting little tidbit of what this camera does but I think for practical purposes and the limitations that it puts on you while you're shooting it can really kinda slow things down with that double the file size problem. And there's very little impact in post production. So its something I'm gonna recommend turning off for about 99.9% of the users out there. But feel free to give it a try and see if it makes a difference in your photography. So let's go in, just in case the video did not show it clearly, I loaded the photos into Keynote here so that we could see what's going on. And this image microadjustment we're gonna zoom in take a close look. You know, on further analysis of what it's doing, this is the standard shot, let me go to the next shot. Front focused back focused and if you look at the out of focus eye, I will jump back and forth here, so look at the out of focus eye and you can see how it goes more out of focus when it's to the back. So it looks like the software is un-focusing if we can use that term, some of the areas to make it give you the illusion that you are moving the focusing. But I'm really not noticing any difference when it comes to movement of it. And I think we're gonna go to the next video, which has to do with another feature of the Dual Pixel RAW. Dual Pixel RAW isn't just for that micro-focus adjustment, we can also use it for Bokeh shift. And what it does is it collects information from the left side and the right side of each pixel and then we're gonna be able to move that back and forth in post production. And what that allows us to do, is it adjusts the background slightly it changes our perspective, you might say, a little bit. We've got Jake here in the trees it's a very good three dimensional environment here so I think this might make an interesting portrait. I've just got the camera set up in live view, I just wanna do this nice and simple. He's standing out from the background. Okay, Jake, there you go, you're posing. That looks fantastic, yes. You can tell I'm a great portrait photographer here. In any case, what this is gonna allow us to do is we're gonna go into post production into the Canon software and we're gonna be able to tweak the way the background looks in subtle amounts. From there we'll see if that makes any big difference in this type of shot. Alright, well we're back in the studio and we're gonna look at the Bokeh shift capabilities of Dual Pixel RAW. What I have open right now is Digital Photo Professional from Canon, it's their software for viewing and working on images. And I have an image that we shot with the Dual Pixel RAW. In order to work on it, what I'm gonna need to do is go up to the tools tab and about fourth item down is called start Dual Pixel RAW optimizer there is a keyboard shortcut as well. What we're gonna be working with is the Bokeh shift. You'll notice it takes a moment to load up in here. As I mentioned before when shooting this, these are very large RAW files in here. So if we turn on the Bokeh shift, we have the option of shifting it to the left and shifting it to the right. Now, it does take a bit of time to process these two images and it's a little bit slow, or at least my computer's a little bit slow in running this back and forth. So what I've done is I've already processed this image and turned it into a file that I've loaded up into Lightroom so we can go back and forth. So let me go ahead and get this full-screen for you. Alright, so this is the left image and the right image. and I'll go back and forth between the two of these. And so you can see there's almost a 3-D effect and, you know, as I said before, I don't think this is what the Canon engineers were trying for, I think they kinda discovered it after they developed this and it's kind of a... Unintended consequences of the way this came out and I don't think most people are gonna have a great need for this. But it is an interesting feature and I'm sure that there are some people that will be able to make a creative use of this. That is the Bokeh shift capabilities. And so, left and right, you can leave it in the middle. It's an interesting little quirk of this feature of this capability in the camera. Not something I think everybody's gonna be using, but give it a try, see if you can find any ways that can help some of your photographs. Okay, and so just in case you wanted to see it again, we have our standard shot here left right and so it is a weird 3-D image in some ways. Now, a final one that we didn't go into in the video is a ghosting reduction. And this one I just was not able to get working in the way that I thought it should work. And so this is with ghosting reduction off and then I turned it on and, boy, that looks like it's adding ghosting not turning it off, and so it adds a very unusual ghosting to some highlight areas. And so I did not extensively test it in every imaginable scenario and so this is something that you may need to go in and try and see if it works for you. It's some interesting stuff, but I can't say that I know of a lot of people that I'm gonna recommend turning this on 'cause doubling the file sizes and as I say it slows the camera down to five frames per second and there's many restrictions. You can't do multiple exposures with it, you can't to HDR with it. It's just interesting, but I think Canon maybe shoulda kept this under wraps... I know they wanted to throw something else out there. But if somebody can make great use of it, I'm anxious to see, expand my horizons. Lets figure out how we can use this. It's got potential but I just don't know that it's there yet. Am I clear enough? Turn it off (laughs) lets turn it off folks.