There’s a billion acronyms in photography; some of them (such as DSLR) are pretty well-known, while others (like SOOC) are less common. SOOC means “straight-out-of-camera” and denotes *ZERO* computer photoshop. No Bridge / Lightroom / Aperture, etc… (If you still do your color correction in Photoshop, you are a DINOSAUR and we need to have a chat… ;-)
Now be honest, fellow photographers, how many of you are TERRIFIED of your friends (clients?) seeing your images SOOC? That’s okay, it’s perfectly normal, this isn’t a scold. It took me the capturing and processing of tens of thousands of images, before I felt like I had a good handle on the whole SOOC thing…
Some photographers are religious RAW shooters, some shoot JPG and create images 10x better than the RAW geeks. Some photographers spend 30 minutes on every single one of the 500 images they’re sharing / delivering, and some photographers just deliver a disc of “SOOC proofs”.
Personally, I run down the middle of the road- I shoot RAW when necessary, yet I make every effort to *nail* the in-camera settings, and shoot JPG whenever possible. (And every now and then, I shoot film! Click HERE to check out a few images, many from this same wedding, taken on Agfa Ultra, and basically “SOOC” as far as film goes…)
In-camera settings are your workflow’s best friend. I’ll blog about my specific in-camera settings on CameraTalk soon, but for now I just want to share what SOOC images *can* look like, and then what images might look like with minor color corrections applied. This is the amount of editing I do for an image that is going to be put on my iPod, (or iPhone, iPad etc.) and Facebook, etc. For albums, prints, and any other product, (or image licensing, etc) … I perform comprehensive correction and retouching, and stylized processing when necessary. But that is another post for another day…
Here are a few SOOC images from last weekend’s wedding, with zero computer editing applied. No exposure, color, or contrast tweaking- just my custom recipe of resizing and sharpening for Facebook etc. viewing, and a watermark. I shot the images in JPG: (And yes, I shoot in-camera B&W JPG sometimes. No guts, no glory!)
Now, what would I do to make these images better? The first three are good enough right out of the camera, but the above shoe shot, I quickly bumped a couple settings in Bridge. It may look almost the same to the un-trained eye, but I’m just really OCD about my images “clarity”… (Hover over each image and give it a sec, for the before & after effect.) …Oh, and since I’m into architectural photography, the crooked lines bugged me so I straightened them. ;-)
(Okay, now we’re back to un-edited, “good enough!” images that I wouldn’t bother editing…)
…Alright, the last image is a trick. Hover over it to see the original. I shot in RAW, just because I was about to also shoot the important formals, in bright sunlight. This scene didn’t really require RAW at all, and I could have shot it in JPG no problem. I’ll post more (RAW) images from this wedding soon, but until then, I hope this blog entry was helpful!
PS: Yes, Strawberry Farms in Irvine again… And yes, those are cactus wedding favors! :-)
Take care,
=Matt=
by Matthew Saville
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