JPG or RAW? What's up?

Ferenc MOGOR · May 17, 2007

Hello to All,

As we all know here, from time to time we used to make a poll on this captioned subject. Now some time has passed so I thought it might be worthwhile to put up the big Q again. ;-)

So, what's your set-up? Do you shoot in jpg mode or do you do all your work in RAW more?

In either case what's your current experience? Are you satisfied with your chosen settings? Are you in a state of experimenting? Do you have well established reasonings to do either or are you looking out for some support from other forum members with a lot of question?

Let's discususs!

)

--
Cheers, Feri

'I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music. Ansel Adams.'

heatherc · May 17, 2007

I've seen some of the past threads on this so I know it's just asking for trouble to say I currently shoot exclusively Jpg. Why? Several reasons, none of which are particularly good ones.

1. All my CF cards are 256k and I'm too mean to buy new ones. (Told you some of the reasons weren't very good!)

2. Until recently I haven't been really doing much post-processing at all except cropping and simple scratch removal/red eye removal. A number of local competitions I shoot for have forbidden what they call "digital manipulation", although that seems to be passing now that most people have digital cameras. I suppose this means I just didn't get into the habit of post-processing my shots.

3. The only software I have to do this with is the original Dimage Viewer...

4. I really hadn't appreciated how much you could do with RAW until I started reading here again a few months ago...

--
Heather

The best picture you'll ever take is just around the corner...

John_B · May 17, 2007

This is a very timely topic/question for me. I just got my A1 back in good working order & purchased a 2 GB card (formerly used a 512k). I'm also lucky to have downloaded the Raw Essentials before they were acquired by Adobe. So, I'm trying to decide which is best, RAW or jpg?

Another question, I had was, If I decide to stay in jpg mode, does "Extra Fine" make any big difference over regular jpg? W/ my new card, I can shoot like 712 photos in jpg, and 420 or so in Extra fine, so there's plenty of room.

In answer to your question Feri, I've pretty much been using Jpg due to card memory space and ease of use. But now, I can definitely go either way. I have experimented in the past w/ RAW and don't mind doing post processing.

Thanks for reviving the topic Feri.

John B.

Adam-T · May 17, 2007

The famous A200 "RAW Pregnant Pause" isn't ideal but the cam is lower in noise (ISO50) than an A2 (so there is ONE benefit) and it's doing the job nicely - I can use JPG if need be also with this cam ...... Rawshooter essentials for conversion of course .

--
Please ignore the Typos, I'm the world's worst Typist

Ferenc MOGOR · May 17, 2007

heatherc said:
I've seen some of the past threads on this so I know it's just
asking for trouble to say I currently shoot exclusively Jpg.

No, no, no, ...no trouble at all!

That's what we've all done in the beginning!

heatherc said:
Why?
Several reasons, none of which are particularly good ones.

heatherc said:
1. All my CF cards are 256k and I'm too mean to buy new ones.
(Told you some of the reasons weren't very good!)

OK, storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper day by day, so storage sould be no object anymore, eh?!

Especially it should not be a sacrifice for image quality.

heatherc said:
2. Until recently I haven't been really doing much post-processing
at all except cropping and simple scratch removal/red eye removal.

I'll get back to you soon in this thread on the subject of doing post-processing on jpgs with pros and cons, but mainly cons!!

heatherc said:
A number of local competitions I shoot for have forbidden what they
call "digital manipulation", although that seems to be passing now
that most people have digital cameras. I suppose this means I just
didn't get into the habit of post-processing my shots.

Well, processing is always at hand but we need to know some techno side background. I'll be with you soon on this subject.

heatherc said:
3. The only software I have to do this with is the original Dimage
Viewer...

Not the best software for editing at the moment.

heatherc said:
4. I really hadn't appreciated how much you could do with RAW until
I started reading here again a few months ago...

Yeah, look out for more to come.

--
Cheers, Feri

'I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music. Ansel Adams.'

Ransom · May 17, 2007

Sometimes we all love our food prepared FOR us, and as long as we know the restaurant, we know they'll do it like we want it, but we always have the option of salt & pepper if needed.

Sometimes we all love our food prepared BY us. As long as we know the store our ingredients come from, and are willing to put in the extra work, we can add all the spices and herbs available. And we still have the option of salt and pepper!!!

I guess it all depends on what we want in the end!
--
Cheers! Robert..

Yves · May 17, 2007

I am the typical tourist, father and grandfather. I use a camera (A1 and now A2 because of A1 failure) because I want souvenirs.

After I take a bunch of pictures on vacation I like to drop them at Costco for printing at 6 x 4 and if I have some very good ones I will do a little post processing and then get a few at 8 x 10. So much for RAW. Costco does not print RAW!

Yes I read and researched all this about RAW and JPG and it was fun to experiment placing the camera on a tripod and shooting the same scene with RAW and then JPG and compare. Clearly there are some advantages to RAW, no denying it. However I can't see enough advantage to convert 200 pictures coming back from a trip or 50 pictures of the granchildren on Easter Sunday. Too much time involved. Just give me some 6 x 4 prints from JPG files as souvenirs and I am happy.

So RAW or JPG? Take your pick and I will not argue about your choice.

sfnikon · May 17, 2007

Life is short and my Nikon D50 produces great jpg images. I shoot raw when the lighting or other conditions make it obvious I need to do some post processing.
--
Jake

drlava · May 17, 2007

I'm no pro, but shooting raw takes the A2 a bit closer to a 'point n shoot' confidence level. No need to worry about white balance, highlights and shadow detail can be recovered often in raw, and I never have to change it from ISO 64 (ISO 200 results in the same or worse noise than an underexposed, then compensated RAW ISO 64.)

Often details can be enhanced using the shadows/highlights tool in PS that would have been grainy or lost if the photo had been in 8-bit jpg.

BUT: it's very time consuming and sometimes I'll wake up the day after procesing and look at yesterdays processed picts and say 'what was I thinking!?' and have to re-do most of them. HA! doubt that would happen with jpg.

simonkit · May 18, 2007

When I first bought the A200 just over 12months ago I exclusively used Jpg, mainly because of the perceived extra effort in RAW processing.

However after taking a little time to learn photoshop I realised that RAW processing doesn't have to take much more time (if any). I now exclusively shoot RAW as I take some of my landscape shots in less than ideal conditions, with JPG some of the shots would be lost, RAW gives me a larger "safety net"

it's also worth knowing that CS3/ACR4.0 has again made RAW processing significantly quicker & easier.

simon

--
http://www.landscapephotographyuk.com/

North Wales photographs - Snowdonia & Anglesey

Paul W UK · May 18, 2007

Richard Yorke · May 18, 2007

I use an A2 which recently replaced an A1. I love them both. Compact compared to a DSLR but versatile enough to use in most situations, and the EVF lefts me view my pictures immediately without needing to find my reading glasses!. I actually started to use RAW with my Cannon S70 which I use underwater. The extra latitude improved my underwater shots no end, so I started to use it more with my A2, in fact I have just shot an entire holiday in Cuba in RAW mode. The result has been some great shots but hours of work. I had taken them all in RAW as I was expecting a beta version of some new software to "intelligently" convert the images, my hope being to produce images at least as good as the jpg images I would normally have taken, but to have the ability to adjust the difficult shots when the software did not do the job I wanted, the end result, hopefully, to have the best of both worlds. The software is late, owing to an outbreak of chickenpox amongst the programmers, but should be arriving soon so I will update you all when it does.
--
Richard

Ferenc MOGOR · May 18, 2007

Richard Yorke said:
I use an A2 which recently replaced an A1. I love them both.
Compact compared to a DSLR but versatile enough to use in most
situations, and the EVF lefts me view my pictures immediately
without needing to find my reading glasses!. I actually started to
use RAW with my Cannon S70 which I use underwater. The extra
latitude improved my underwater shots no end, so I started to use
it more with my A2, in fact I have just shot an entire holiday in
Cuba in RAW mode. The result has been some great shots but hours of
work. I had taken them all in RAW as I was expecting a beta
version of some new software to "intelligently" convert the images,
my hope being to produce images at least as good as the jpg images
I would normally have taken, but to have the ability to adjust the
difficult shots when the software did not do the job I wanted, the
end result, hopefully, to have the best of both worlds. The
software is late, owing to an outbreak of chickenpox amongst the
programmers, but should be arriving soon so I will update you all
when it does.
--
Richard

Hi Richard,

There is already such a program on the market that does intelligent RAW batch conversion and it's called Adobe PhotoShop CS2 or CS3!

On my PC (2 gigHz, 1 gig RAM) it takes PhotoShop about 5-6 seconds to convert a single RAW file and save it to a dedicated new folder in jpg. (Repeat: 5-6 seconds!)

--
Cheers, Feri

'I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music. Ansel Adams.'

Richard Yorke · May 18, 2007

Well I must be missing something. If I have a run of similar shots I can adjust the first, save the settings and apply then to the rest but each batch ideally requires its own settings. It seems to me that the results of in camera processing seem better than a batch run through CS2 without any customisation. The problem is that when the camera has failed you don't have all the data to make your own corrections as you do with RAW and this is when I find Raw Shooter the ideal. As I understand it the new software will optimise the RAW conversion intelligently, along the lines of Perfectly Clear in Bibble, but hopefully with an interface I can understand.
--
Richard

Ferenc MOGOR · May 18, 2007

Richard Yorke said:
Well I must be missing something. If I have a run of similar shots
I can adjust the first, save the settings and apply then to the
rest but each batch ideally requires its own settings. It seems to
me that the results of in camera processing seem better than a
batch run through CS2 without any customisation. The problem is
that when the camera has failed you don't have all the data to make
your own corrections as you do with RAW and this is when I find Raw
Shooter the ideal. As I understand it the new software will
optimise the RAW conversion intelligently, along the lines of
Perfectly Clear in Bibble, but hopefully with an interface I can
understand.
--
Richard

Richard,

If I can understand your query correctly then I can thell you that you can do both in PhotoShop CS2 and CS3. You can customize the first settings of your first RAW in a batch or you can let PhotoShop do an intelligent and individual conversion on each of the RAW files. This function is available when you open your full set of RAW shots in the Browser.

--
Cheers, Feri

'I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music. Ansel Adams.'

DAVE BRENCHLEY · May 18, 2007

jpeg to RAW then back to jpeg

Couldn't be doing with the tardiness of it all, the memory banks - OR the LOSS of in-camera functions.

We all end up doing a bit of Post Processing if we know what we want the picture to end up like, so, after RAW/after jpeg - same buttons to press!

I certainly can't discern much (if any) difference in Quality - more importantly, NEITHER do my CUSTOMERS!

I know this will go against the Minolta Forum stalwarts, but I'd advise anyone to get to know your camera, learn about white balance, use the memory settings and enjoy jpeg!! Try and take the picture before you press the shutter and not fall back on trying to PP over bad technique.

Ray Brown · May 18, 2007

JPG for most people, critter, and street shots and RAW for those "special" sunsets, landscapes etc. Those are the ones that you know in advance that you want to PP experiment with.

Ray

D7ug - D7Hi - A1 - Now A2
http://www.pbase.com/xray

GiorgioPM · May 18, 2007

Yves said:
I am the typical tourist, father and grandfather. I use a camera
(A1 and now A2 because of A1 failure) because I want souvenirs.
After I take a bunch of pictures on vacation I like to drop them at
Costco for printing at 6 x 4 and if I have some very good ones I
will do a little post processing and then get a few at 8 x 10. So
much for RAW. Costco does not print RAW!

Until you don't have to correct any of your photos and you are available to discard (or accept as they are) wrong exposed or W/B JPG works fine.

If you use the post-processing when necessary, it is better to use RAW and there is no one reason to use JPG.

Current 4GB CF cost $76 or less (and you can store up to 320 pictures: even exagerating you don't shut more in a day) and 2GB CF is around $40.

It is a good practice to download the CF in a laptop or portable Hard Drive at the end of the day, not to loose all in case of power glitch or CF failure (I never had problems with my CFs, but some guy had).

You don’t loose time converting RAW into JPG, because you can run a batch job to convert them all in TIFF by one simple command (available in the DiMAGE Viewer that comes for free). Then you can convert the obtained TIFFs by some other program.

However, if some of the pictures are wrongly exposed, not enough saturated in color (and so on), you can correct the RAW without loose anything, because the RAW has 12bit of dynamic, while the JPG 8b (equivalent of 2 stops of compensation lossless).

--
GiorgioPM

GiorgioPM · May 18, 2007

sfnikon said:
Life is short and my Nikon D50 produces great jpg images. I shoot
raw when the lighting or other conditions make it obvious I need to
do some post processing.
--

Considering current CF price, does it worth to pay the risk of mistake in that 10% (plus the nuisance of have to evaluate the situation and change camera settings)?

Moreover, in today consumer level display may be the 8bit dynamic range of JPG is enough not to see any difference, but tomorrow?

Try to give a look on a professional CRT and compare picture taken JPG to the same picture taken RAW and converted in 48bit uncompressed TIFF.

--
GiorgioPM

Gideon01 · May 18, 2007

: What I shoot :

I now shoot RAW+ most of the time.

I find that when shooting conditions are nice and easy, my converted RAWS are practically indistinguishable from the JPEGs. However in many cases it's certainly RAW to the rescue.

: What I use :

There is nothing I would like more than to build my workflow and DAM around a LightRoom-Photoshop combination, since I already use PhotoShop. I would even pay Adobe's outrageous prices for what I consider the smoothest workflow solution out there. The only thing keeping me from doing so is ACR's total inadequacy as regards colour rendition. Don't want to go on about the subject because I'm starting to sound like a broken record.

So for now I use the free version of SilkyPix most of the time, undecided about whether to buy it, and then probably get iView Media Pro for DAM, or wait and see if Adobe get their inexcusable act together sometime soon.

--
Gideon

PAW - Week 30

JPG or RAW? What's up?

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