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April 21, 2005
Beware of "experts"
He's a nice enough chap, David Pogue, co-creator of the Missing Manual series of books that has since been bought out by O'Reilly, and now Circuits columnist in the New York Times.
But now that he's taken to writing about digital cameras, he's been upsetting our pal, Apal, who frankly thinks that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
In this article, for instance, Pogue reveals that he knows absolutely nothing about the RAW format, which he describes as "a cumbersome kind of picture", and therefore shouldn't be pretending to all those readers of the New York Times that they're getting expert advice. That's the polite version. The frank version from Apal is this: "The man's an idiot."
First, he writes about RAW as though it took him completely by surprise and that he was perplexed and indignant to find that RAW files are camera-specific. Hey, come on! Who doesn't know this?
Second, he is obviously ignorant of the fact that Adobe make available RAW converters for the files he was trying to open. These converters simply add-on to Photoshop and then you can "Browse" RAW images the same as jpegs or tiffs.
How can a person represent himself as an expert on digital photography and not know this? It means that he hasn't tried RAW before, which is disgraceful enough, but it also means that he is not aware of what Adobe offer by way of enhancements to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements 3 -- so he goes looking for some feeble little freeware RAW converter for his laptop.
And there is the dead giveaway -- it's a Mac! We might have guessed. RAW is a man's photo file format and the Mac is a girl's computer. I'm surprised that he even knew which end of the Nikon and Canon SLRs to look through. I bet he has a lilac ixus400 for personal use that plays Lavender Blue when he turns it on.
RAW is not "a cumbersome type of picture" -- it is the raw information from the camera which has not been processed. White balance, exposure, levels, curves, sharpness, contrast, noise reduction and other image parameters can be set in the computer by visual inspection and manual control. Where has this man been since day one of the digital revolution?
We can hardly wait for Apal's reaction to Pogue's review of those two cameras.
Posted by cw at April 21, 2005 06:47 PM
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Comments
Isn't an expert defined as a drip under pressure?
Posted by: jamrob at April 21, 2005 07:42 PM