RAW vs JPEG for pros - what's your take?

krusadr said:

I'm keeping the plastic covers on though.

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I just park my $20,000 car in my living room and use it's leather seats.

Those plastic covers wear out too quickly. You'll end up spending WAY too much money on replacement covers.

I suppose you could cover your sofa with everyone's wasted prints made from those inferior JPG files.

--
See my gallery at the 'Beacon Don't Bore-'em with Decorum Forum'

BTW, in case it was not clear, the primary cost of piling up 1750 DVD's in a year is not the blank DVD, but the time that would take to burn them, verify them, and store them in a manner that will enable future look-up. From then on, every retrieval run the risk of turning them out of order. Over ten years, close to 20k entries makes the task comparable to running a town library! And we all know how often books in libraries are "lost" because they are in a wrong place!

JPG has its place, of course. I don't blame the race shooter who can stack up 5000 shots of cars in a few hours. It all boils down to what the best tool is, at the moment. Same thing goes with lenses, camera bodies, flash settings, shutter speeds, etc.

I adore the flexability that RAW delivers. I could pull off JPEG on a lot of things I shoot, but with memory as cheap as it is, the most important things, the things that will require the most ammount of editing and time, will always get put in the highest quality and most flexible format you can possibly put them in. It's just good sense.







--
Warning: Known to cause insanity in labratory mice in California

Timothy Szczesniak
http://www.FTBPhotography.com

I agree but I never work directly with JPEG, usuallay a TIFF.
--
Let the light in! Walt
[email protected]

nanook s said:

2. The real cost of storage is not just memory cards. 1-2k RAW
images from 1DsII takes 20-30gig; RAW+JPG would be some 40gig.
That's 10 DVD's for a full set of backups, before any sorting or
editing is done. A duplicate set is another 10 DVD's. After
editing, let's say you get it down to 30gig for keepers; that's
another 14-16 DVD discs for two sets. So far you have burned about
35 DVD's! just for two sets at the beginning and two sets at the
end of editing. At 15min per (the lead-in and lead-out time do
not shorten even as you go to 8x, and frankly the high-speed burns
tend to be less stable over the long term storage), including
labelling all the DVD's, that's still 9hrs! Now multiply that 35
per wedding by 50 weddings that you do in a year . . . 1750-DVD
stack in a year, see, you have a problem on your hand. The cost
of data storage over the long haul far exceeds memory cards.

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You need a better workflow if that's how you're archiving your stuff. That's just ridiculous.

Memory Card is not an issue . . . I have well over 50gig worth of memory cards. Archive strategy is, especially given that DVD data standard has been stationary for over half a decade, and hard drive sizes have stopped doubling year or so like they did in the late 90's. Back when CD's were the backup storage medium, many well known pro's shot JPG's at less than the highest quality level that the camera could offer, all because of archive requirement.

For the same reason, nowadays I tell my least experienced employees to shoot RAW and they are effectively on training status and have to watch out how much they shoot, simply due to archival requirement. They get promoted when they can nail shots on the fly and switch to JPG shooting. The difference between a well exposed JPG and RAW can not begin to compare to being able to find a picture from a wedding several years ago vs. having it lost in a sea of DVD discs.

When BlueRay or HD DVD writable discs are here, or hard drive capacity get back to exponential growth again, I may change policy.

Zimvg said:

so only stupid people use jpeg? That is stupid. Maybe they should
make raw only camera's.

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Nowhere does he mention that persons that choose to shoot JPEG(for what ever reason) are stupid.

He said that RAW gives the photographer complete control over his/her images final result. AND if anyone dissagrees they are missinformed or stupid.

Do you feel that jpeg gives more control?

What I feel is stupid is those that claim RAW is only for those that cant get good exposures in camera.

You probably get as much control when taking the picture. You get more control in post with raw. But it also takes time. I don't think every picture needs tp be raw. It really depends on what you are doing.

--
RDKirk
'TANSTAAFL: The only unbreakable rule in photography.'

actually

weddings are all raw, no questions, if needed I get more cards but shooting less than raw is out of the question.
I do not know a single wedding photographer shooting jpg, not even a single one.

The problem with the storage is indeed growing, more or less like it used to be archiving the 6x6 negatives with the difference that now we can duplicate the storage and make more raws , I mean more negatives

besides, for the cameras I've been using there is no difference in terms of speed nor continuous shooting performance between raw and jpg.

this reply is not intended as a disagreement, just to report what a wedding photographer actually does ...

There is a difference between pro's you know who use raw and pro's you know "of" in this thread pro's are saying they use jpgs. I've been a pro longer than most and shoot jpg for weddings, do you simply ignore comments by those claiming to shoot jpg?

Really? So they use just hard drives/web storage?

Personally I use DVDs and HDD. I consider myself of at least marginal intelligence.

so many of these answers are so dang dogmatic.

it relates to 'who/what's a pro?'. shooting documentation for an outdoor billboard company, school portraits, wedding candids, high school sports, some local politico blathering on about nothing, local zoning board meeting, etc, etc---why use raw?

all this jazz is completely ephemeral. who will care about it 100 years from now---in fact for a lot of it , who will care next week? why waste your valuable time converting and tweaking?

for other, more significant stuff, historical, architectural documentation, formal portraiture, fine arts, landscape, ivory billed woodpeckers, etc, etc, as well as anything you know in advance will have to be heavily manipulated, then raw is the answer---why risk jpeg?

The DVD's are for off-line storage. The first line of defense here against local hard drive failure is a duplex RAID-5 system running out of two different offices in the building, each running 7 300GB hard drives for a total of 1.8 Terabytes times 2. The next upgrade is for 7 750GB hard drives RAID-5 arrays as soon as they can do 750 disks in 3 platters instead of the current 5-platter design. The DVD's are backups in case of break-in and vandalisation.

I used to rely on two parallel systems of external hard drives and DVD's for off-site backup. However, one hard drive failed on me despite my careful choice of Seagate two-platter 200GB hard drives three years ago. The problem with external hard drive is that their most likely failure time is when they are spinning up after a long time of storage.

If you have a better idea of what smart people should do, I'm all ears

That's not how my work flow is like, thanks for not shooting entirely in RAW only. If I were shooting entirely in RAW only, that's how my work flow would be like. I would very much like to hear if you have an idea that would provide as robust a data security as my system when you are faced with 30-40gig data each wedding, and one wedding each on Fri, Sat and Sun in a row. Download 30-40gig from a stack of cards alone would take a couple hours! Unless you business is relatively small, shooting entirely in RAW would quickly bury yourself in data management.

In any case, I just think your time would be far better spent actually tweaking and enhancing images for clients instead of shuffling gobs of RAW data. From my experience, the limit to what can be done to a RAW image vs what can be done to a properly exposed fine JPG is not drasticly different, certainly not worth the massive difference in data handling and the risk that in itself would entail.

... always depending on what they shoot. for example on new york fashion week there have bee hundreds of photographers and nearly all of them shoot jpg. including me. when i shoot weddings, i shoot jpg, some simple portraits, i shoot jpg. for newspaper i shoot jpg.

i only shoot raw for fine art portraits that i print large for exhibitions where i spend many days and hundreds of $ on one single image. there i shoot raw.

for everything else and this is 70% for me, jpg is just right and easier to use and faster to edit.
... it is not true that all professionals shoot raw all the time.
regards
thomas

the habit to take shortcuts is written in the books of fast action photyography (for a reason), but over the years of digital (not so many, so experience doesn't count much in there) I did start using a D100 in jpeg when I was still shooting a bronica with ... film. (by then, 4 years ago, I didn't even know the real difference bewteen raw and jpeg)

let's face it: digital is just few years old.. what experience has to do with the choice of the format of preference?
We are all young in this..

I am open to suggestions, and this place is the best there is, suggestions from amateurs as well: but what I know I want to share it as well.. after all saving space on the card doesn't pay back in the long run, so it is also my duty to explain my experience and vision.

An example, real life thing happened to me no more than 8 months ago: I was shooting a parade (by mistake because I had a cancelation and I didn't know what to do that afternoon): I had just one card in the camera and I started shooting raw (as usual): after a while I was thinking about switching to jpeg because I was about to fill the card. I didn't and guess what? 12 shots were selected to be printed on panels 12x4 (ft) for few hundred stores... you know what? You really never know when you may need the maximum quality acheavable by your camera.

This example is real, but anyone is free to choose the best setting for his own photography of course. Still, it's my duty to tell my experience.

From the tone of your answer I see that my reply has been misunderstood, like a form of arrogance on my part : it's not, honest.

Raw is for amateurs who don't know their camera and can't get decent exposure, and correct WB. Raw is to cover up their mistakes.

"Real PROs aren't afraid of JPGs".

I find it similar as people taking loose compositions, and doing extensive cropping on images after the shot. I like to decide the composition during the shot, it's part of being a decisive photographer. It's part of the art of photography.

"RAW is for cowards"...

IMHO, JPG Fine would have done just fine on that day. Offset printing, usually used for mounting on boards, does only 140-180ppi. There is no resolution difference between RAW and JPG anyway. Offset printing color gamut is much narrower than 8bit JPG; 12bit RAW would just mean more data to be tossed away.

Experience related to two issues: (1) Photography in general, especially exposure, which is a valuable set of knowledge that gets carried over from one tool to another; (2) familiarity with a particular tool. If I'm not familiar with a particular camera, I would shoot in RAW because the meter/sensor pair might be slightly off one way or another.

That being said, I agree with you that in the not too distant future, data storage is probably be less of an issue, as the real useful megapix count is close to hit practical ceiling, and data storage technology resumes its usual exponential doubling. It's just that in the past few years, while the megpix count doubled and then doubled again, while storage technology paused before the arrival of perpendicular recording technology, only becoming available on 3.5" desktop drives this month. Before this month, the per platter hard drive storage went from 100meg to 133meg over 4 years while Nikons went from 3-4 megpix to 10megpix and Canons went from 6megpix to 13-17megpix. I would not entrust my clients' image data to hard drives that involve more than 2 or 3 platters. There was a time when I shot 3megpix and 6megpix cameras in RAW, but the amount of data involved rapidly became unmanageable when the cameras went to over a dozen megpixes while the hard drive capacity and DVD capacity stagnated. Hopefully that's bound to change, and soon.