Status-Q

This marvellous contraption, which I think comes somewhere between R2-D2 and H.G Wells’s Martian machines, is part of the exhibition of steelmaking equipment at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield.

A note for any serious photographers amongst you: I captured this in very limited light at ISO 1600 on my Lumix GH2. I’m becoming increasingly fond of the micro-four-thirds system, but the sensor on this body, though generally very good, isn’t always at its best in low-light conditions when compared to recent DSLRs. I didn’t quite get what I wanted when processing this photo in Lightroom.

But after seeing a couple of references to it recently especially in the context of high-ISO images, I tried the free Rawker utility to do the initial RAW conversion, and was very pleased with the noticeable improvement. I saved it out as a TIFF and then imported that into Lightroom for final adjustment. I wouldn’t do this for all my photos – not least because the intermediate TIFF is 128 MB – but doing a side-by-side comparison with the one imported directly does show a noticeable improvement. This may be down to default settings more than the converter itself, but you might find Rawker worth investigating for important images.