Lumia 1020 RAW (DNG) - day 1

To date, I'd not been overly impressed by the Lumia 1020's hyped pureview camera.  The results seemed oversharpened, oversaturated, and not completely great.  A bit of research, a few tweaks, and I am now much happier.

Moving from Standard JPG to RAW

I'm now much happier with the output, but I had to do a bit of research to get here.  I didn't make note of the sources which got me to this point, but I'll try to do a better job of documentation next time.

Step 1- Camera settings

I went into the settings menu from Nokia Pro Cam.  (Tap the ... in the lower right, then tap settings.) I switched from JPEG (5 MP) to JPEG+DNG (34 MP).  NB: unless you have the so called "Black" Nokia update, this option may not be available to you.

Job done, I thought.  I took a few test shots, waited for them to appear in my SkyDrive : Camera Roll folder, then imported them into LightRoom 5.  And had no joy.  All I was seeing was the same old 718x1277 jpg files.  More research.

Step 2 - Tethered import 

It turns out that the 1020 only syncs the 5MP images to SkyDrive.  The large 34 MP .dng files stay on the phone.

I plugged the phone into my desktop (Windows 8.1) and after a brief automated install was able to browse to the camera roll straight from the LightRoom import dialogue.

Step 3 - LightRoom 1020 profiles

Once I could view the images in LightRoom at the pixel level, I gained a much better feeling for what the camera is capable of (and also its limitations).  But I think that's for another post.

However, I had discovered that staff at Nokia have come up with 3 camera profiles for LightRoom.  This page explains their purpose, how to install them, and where to get them: http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/01/15/available-now-dng-color-profiles-adobe-lightroom/

The results

Default JPEG (5 MP) SOOC (Straight off of Camera)

 DNG post-processed in LightRoom