# Shooting a 5DSR in M RAW Vs 5D MK III



## Mardave8080 (Mar 29, 2015)

Hi All,

First post here so please go lightly and forgive any technical incompetence on my part. 
I've been a photographer for some 40 years but only recently moved into the digital realm and found it refreshed the creative joy I used to feel all those years ago.

Landscape photography is my main thing but I also shoot wildlife (deer, foxes etc) and the occasional portrait. So far I've been using a crop sensor Canon 650D with the intention to move to FF and have already invested in some EF glass in readiness (L24-70 f2.8ii, L70-200 f2.8, older L100-400 f4.5).

Image quality (lower noise) is the main reason for looking to move to FF and the 5D III has been on my shortlist for some time (despite shooting mainly landscape I don't feel the AF system on the 6D offers me enough scope for other subjects) BUT the new 5DSR has thrown me, as it seems to offer everything I could ever need for landscape plus newer features that would suit other subjects (better tracking and the option for 1.6 crop when needed for greater reach).

My question is: If chose the 5DSR and I used the full fat 50MP just for landscape but chose to use one of my custom settings for wildlife and used the 5DSR on M RAW (28MP) how would you expect the noise to compare with the 5D III set to RAW (22MP)?

I should say, most of my landscape shots are low ISO and my wildlife ones are rarely above 6400 but I sometimes have to crop them more, so noise becomes an issue.

I'd welcome some technical insight into how the two cameras/settings might compare.

Thanks, Mark


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## takesome1 (Mar 29, 2015)

The crop setting does not give you more "reach". It crops you picture in camera instead of in PP. Smaller files but your burst and frame rate stay the same.
IMO it is a useless function. 

I intend to use mine for wildlife. IMO if you intend to use smaller files you are taking away from the very reason I want it. Wildlife I want as much fine eye detail I can get. The more resolution the more I can crop, the better to work with.

No the noise will not improve by smaller files, you can't cheat the system that way. And if I am wrong you can't get to a 5d III level, if you could you would see many more fans of this new release.


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## arjay (Mar 29, 2015)

Mardave8080 said:


> Hi All,
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> ...



Interesting question. Got me to wondering, how noise is affected (if at all) with mRAW
I just now shot out the window, one shot in raw, one in mRAW on the 5D mkIII.
Identical exposures,
Identical processing (lift the shadows about 3 stops, no noise reduction, no sharpening)
the raw is sized at 66%, the mRaw is 100%
Who knows how the the 5DSR will compare?


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## Mardave8080 (Mar 29, 2015)

Thanks gentlemen!

Takesome1: Thanks for clarifying - although it's not a significant factor in me considering the 5DS, I was under the illusion that the 1.6 crop mode would give me the same magnification as my APSC sensor and I'm not the only one.

In Tech Radar's article on the 5DS they say, "This is more useful than it might sound. You might be used to the 'reach' your 70-300mm telephoto gives you on your APS-C Canon, and now you can get the same effective magnification on the 5DS. You'll also get much more manageable file sizes – 50MP is brilliant, but you won't necessarily need it all the time."

With regard to my main question, my hope was that the 28MP M RAW setting on the 5DS would be processed in camera somehow to yield a similar image quality and noise level to the 5D III RAW but from what you've said it seems that isn't the case.

Arjay: Thank you - to my eyes the M RAW at 100% seems to show less noise than the RAW file at 66%, which I don't understand.

On paper, the 5DS could be great for landscape shots but like many folks I don't just take one type of picture and I don't want an expensive one trick pony. I read elsewhere that the 5DS has a similar pixel size to the 7D II, so if I end up cropping down for wildlife shots won't noise just be similar to the 7D II, in which case what am I gaining over using a 7D II for those shots? It seems like I might be better buying a 5D III body for better IQ on landscape shots (compared to my current 650D) and a 7D II (with better AF system than my 650D) just for wildlife...the overall cost for the two bodies would be the same as buying the 5DS alone.


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Mar 29, 2015)

arjay said:


> Mardave8080 said:
> 
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> > Hi All,
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Even Canon has weighed in on this. MRAW does not decrease noise, it merely throws away image data to make the file smaller.


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## TeT (Mar 29, 2015)

arjay said:


> Mardave8080 said:
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> > Hi All,
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Why does the MRAW look better?


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## takesome1 (Mar 29, 2015)

Mardave8080 said:


> Thanks gentlemen!
> 
> Takesome1: Thanks for clarifying - although it's not a significant factor in me considering the 5DS, I was under the illusion that the 1.6 crop mode would give me the same magnification as my APSC sensor and I'm not the only one.
> 
> ...



Indeed you could buy the 7D II and have the same resolution for many wildlife applications. But doing so you concede that all your shots are focal length limited and you crop almost 100% of the time. If however you can get close enough with the FF camera and you do not have to crop you could have better results with FF than the 7D II with equal framing. This is true also of the FF offerings available now.

The 7D II resolution advantage over my 5D II is around 20%. Don't be misslead by the x1.6 and 2.5x area and pixel density debate. In real world practice you can get a 15 to 20% distance advantage for resolution over the current offerings. A 400 mm doesn't turn in to a 640mm lens.


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## Mardave8080 (Mar 29, 2015)

Takesome1: Unlike my landscape shots, most of my wildlife photos are influenced by how close I can get to the subject, without spooking them (or sometimes risking my skin) and my stealthiness hasn't improved with age and creaky bones 

The upshot is that unless I take out a mortgage for a long L prime lense then the wildlife shots I take will always require cropping and be a balance of budget limited focal length/optical quality and sensor quality/noise. As with most things in life, it's a trade-off.

When I take landscape photos I have the benefit of time, tripod, low ISO and a wide angle lens with pretty good optics and reasonable sharpness. By contrast, most of my wildlife photos are taken on the fly, handheld or using a monopod, with a mid level IS telephoto lense and at higher ISO's (reflecting the time of day or subjects physical location). 

In most cases I might be cropping 30-40% of the image at the moment from the 18MP APSC image, but would imagine that would increase to approx 48-64% of the 50MP FF image however, given the vast increase in MPs of the 5DS should the image quality still be better (assuming I can keep the camera still enough, the IS works well enough, my chosen aperture is close to the lenses sweet spot, the ISO is reasonable and my astrological chart is in balance that day  ....)??


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## zim (Mar 29, 2015)

TeT said:


> Why does the MRAW look better?



M stands for Magic

Would love for a couple of others do this test please!


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## Mardave8080 (Mar 29, 2015)

M stands for Magic

;D Certainly looks that way from Arjay's test shots.
Other FF RAW/MRAW test shots would be interesting to see.
Is there any indication that MRAW files have any processing applied in camera (sort of like the noise reduction in DXO Optics)?


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## takesome1 (Mar 29, 2015)

Mardave8080 said:


> Takesome1: Unlike my landscape shots, most of my wildlife photos are influenced by how close I can get to the subject, without spooking them (or sometimes risking my skin) and my stealthiness hasn't improved with age and creaky bones
> 
> The upshot is that unless I take out a mortgage for a long L prime lense then the wildlife shots I take will always require cropping and be a balance of budget limited focal length/optical quality and sensor quality/noise. As with most things in life, it's a trade-off.
> 
> ...



Once you cropped the image down to crop camera size it "should" be equal to the 7D II. Whether you crop in body or later in PP does not matter.

"Should" we do not have one in hand to verify this. We only have specs and advertising hype to judge on.


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## TeT (Mar 29, 2015)

zim said:


> M stands for Magic



Here we go: pictures taken on Canon 6D with only RAW to MRAW setting changed in camera. Opened in PS RAW bumped exposure +2 & +10 down the line (shadows highlights contrast etc...). Opened to PS & re-sized and saved as JPG with appropriate name. Third set of pics is with EXposure +3 & Shadows +30...

Not a lot of difference, BUT the MRAW adjusted files seem to have less saturation(?) compared to the RAW while the original MRAW & RAW are a closer match...

Maybe M is for magic...


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## Mardave8080 (Mar 29, 2015)

Thanks for those pics TeT. As you say not much difference but I still think there is some, especially comparing the dark upper left wood grain, when zoomed in, the MRAW seems to my eye to contain less noise than the RAW image. 


I've read elsewhere about Bayer interpolation, could this explain the slight difference in noise.


Forgive me if I'm barking up the wrong tree technically, my knowledge of digital image capture is still in its infancy.


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## zim (Mar 29, 2015)

TeT said:


> zim said:
> 
> 
> > M stands for Magic
> ...



Thanks TeT, interesting about the saturation

I did a quick and dirty test with my 7D, exact same settings and scene and I thought I noticed a slight exposure difference. I put that down to user error but now I'm wondering!

Regards


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## TeT (Mar 29, 2015)

zim said:


> TeT said:
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> > zim said:
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I only really noticed change on adjusted images.
Mine does show exposure difference as well on the adjusted...
I actually did a second subject thinking that I had done something to mess up the results (it is a quick & dirty unscientific test), but the second round was consistent with the first...

If anyone knows the why, we would appreciate a share in that knowledge...


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## zim (Mar 29, 2015)

+1 What TeT said!


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## bdunbar79 (Apr 3, 2015)

takesome1 said:


> The crop setting does not give you more "reach". It crops you picture in camera instead of in PP. Smaller files but your burst and frame rate stay the same.
> IMO it is a useless function.
> 
> I intend to use mine for wildlife. IMO if you intend to use smaller files you are taking away from the very reason I want it. Wildlife I want as much fine eye detail I can get. The more resolution the more I can crop, the better to work with.
> ...



No, that's not always true. Noise CAN improve by downsampling to mRAW from a 50 MP file. Noise = SQRT (#photons) so as you downsample, noise goes away FASTER. An mRAW shot from a 50 MP sensor could certainly have less noise than a native 28 MP file from another camera.


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## dak723 (Apr 3, 2015)

TeT said:


> Why does the MRAW look better?



According to this article:

https://photographylife.com/sraw-format-explained

The sraw and mraw formats do indeed downsample and that may explain the lesser amount of noise.


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## zim (Apr 4, 2015)

dak723 said:


> TeT said:
> 
> 
> > Why does the MRAW look better?
> ...



Thanks, that's a very interesting article. Might be interesting for some experimenting with the new 5ds(r) cameras.
As one of the commenters says.....This article seems to emphasize too much Nikon implementation, which really didn't seem to make sense. But for Canon shooters, it is definitaly worth a try.


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## skoobey (Apr 5, 2015)

5d III would probably look better.


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## adventureous (Apr 5, 2015)

A quote from this article https://photographylife.com/sraw-format-explained

"As you can see, Canon’s sRAW and mRAW files are simply down-sampled images from the original full-resolution RAW files. If you were to take a RAW file, then down-sample it yourself in Photoshop, you would get a similar result. Except you would have the full RAW file data to work with in wide gamut color space, while sRAW actually strips out a lot of information. So sRAW is actually not anything like the original RAW file!" 

This is my exact experience. "So sRAW (and MRAW) is actually not anything like the original RAW file!" I tried shooting in MRaw and SRAW on my 5DII and made adjustments in LR and it was very crappy. So shoot in the full RAW, make adjustments in LR and then down-sample in LR to the MRAW or SRAW size and it is good. The same thing should happen with the 5DS except the file size is bigger to begin with so the down-sampled image should be great.


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## Frodo (Apr 5, 2015)

I too have similar questions to the OP and am considering moving up from my 5DII.

It would be great if more DSLRs used pixel-binning. This is where the signal from four or nine pixels is aggregated into one signal. This increases the effective size of the pixels and reduces noise at a significant cost in resolution. My G10 employed this and produced 1.9 megapixel images. Noise definitely declined at high ISOs but I found that the reduced file size limited the value of this. Now if the 50 megapixel 5DS used pixel binning, that would be exciting! 7MP would be very useable.

However the mRAW is simply reducing file size by throwing away information. I have used this occasionally when going on family vacations simply to use storage space with my 5DII. And then there is an image I wish to crop heavily or enlarge significantly...


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## Mardave8080 (Apr 5, 2015)

Frodo said:


> It would be great if more DSLRs used pixel-binning. This is where the signal from four or nine pixels is aggregated into one signal. This increases the effective size of the pixels and reduces noise at a significant cost in resolution. My G10 employed this and produced 1.9 megapixel images. Noise definitely declined at high ISOs but I found that the reduced file size limited the value of this. Now if the 50 megapixel 5DS used pixel binning, that would be exciting! 7MP would be very useable.



Thank you Frodo. I wasn't aware it was called 'Pixel Binning' but you've just described what I was hoping the 5DS would be capable of offering as an option with MRAW, a way of utilising the data gathering power of 50MP but for those occasions when you want a smaller file but still retaining reasonable resolution and low noise.

Having heard from other respondents and read other articles I now realise MRAW is a different beast altogether and doesn't offer what I was after but perhaps Pixel Binning could. 

If the 5DS doesn't provide an option as standard, I wonder if the clever folks behind Magic Lantern could find a way!?


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