b&w raw v b&w jpg

I have just had an adventure with a sdhd card and my little test has no jpg data to compare so I will have to follow this up with more experiments later.

However:

I have previously taken some very satisfying b&w low light shots in native b&w jpg only.

Yesterday I took some b&w raw images. When I checked the full size jpg that came up in the camera review mode it seemed in keeping with my earlier examples.

Due to problems with my not-understanding the limitations of old sd card readers with sdhd cards I seem to have lost my jpg examples - but I saved my raw files.

When I processed the raw files through Lightroom they came up very noisy. Much worse than I normally see with my native b&w images.

Perhaps my conversion technique is leaving something to be desired - however the original images may still be at fault. Once I get another opportunity to test I will compare the images more rigorously.

atm (admittedly without a benchmark) I am disappointed with my b&w conversions from raw and I am wondering whether Ricoh's own internal algorythm to convert b&w images in "b&w native mode" for jpg is more effective than Lightroom (at least) conversion from colour raw image.

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Tom Caldwell

RAW is noisy at ISO200 (I have yet to test out RAW at lower ISOs), terrible at ISO400, but with your fav noisy reduction program you can get similiar results to the "out-of-camera" jpgs ....

I have some really low light images with high iso in b&w native in jpg - seems to have a soft fine grain. But my first efforts in this field with "b&w" raw - actually colour-raw and b&w jpg left me with really large-grained noise after converting the colour raw to b&w jpg.

I lost the jpg copies but have now recovered them off the card so I will be checking the b&w native jpg files against the converted raw ones - just for interest - I mght be climbing the wrong tree but I just can't believe that the converted raw files were so bad in b&w.

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Tom Caldwell

The camera applies noise reduction to JPGs; not the same with RAW. With RAW, you will have to do all the PP steps.

What you are seeing is the noise of the sensor in all its full RAW glory. When the G7 came out without RAW, there was some speculation that Canon chose not to include it, because the noise would be uggly with 10 Mp. I have no idea if it is true or not.

You might remember Tom I posted a comparison between RAW and large JPEG images shot at 100 ISO just after taking delivery of my GX100 a week or so ago. I was confused at the time about how noisy the RAW images were in comparison to JPEG.

Still, I believe that for any 'serious' imaging, RAW is the way to go. I can easily tidy up the noise and I firmly believe that the RAW image is superior overall
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Cheers
Tony

A very interesting topic. The fact that the GX100 RAW files have quite a bit of noise whereas the jpegs do not indicates that the camera's internal processing is at work. The question that would interest me is: does the camera's internal processing also remove some low, fine contrast detail?

If so, then you might be able to retain more detail using RAW. What I usually do with my LX2 files is to convert them using Silkypix with all the noise reduction sliders set to zero. I then remove noise using the Noise Ninja plugin. Usually colour noise over all of the image, saving the detail destroying luminance noise reduction only for those areas of a photo that don't contain detail.

Another aspect of RAW conversion is the ability to retain highlight detail. The following example is from a converted LX2 RAW file, although when experimenting with GX100 DNG files, the effect is similar. Usually you can recover more detail in highlight areas using RAW.

On the left is a crop of an out-of-camera JPEG with overexposed and underexposed areas. All picture adjustment settings were set to low, except sharpness which was set to standard.

The crop of the RAW file on the right, converted with Silkypix 3.0E, was developed with the lowest contrast setting. The RAW conversion has retained more detail in the highlights – areas that are completely white in the JPEG crop. The unnatural cyan cast is also gone in the RAW conversion.



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Björn

galleries: http://www.pbase.com/viztyger

Bjorn

Intersting to note that the raw processing improved the foam and lost on the rock detail.

My thoughts on the native b&w jpg versus the same image capture in colour raw converted to b&w jpg are far from complete. It was an "accidental" situation at the weekend when I took some images indoors in low light and (as I do) converted to b&w mode to get a better effect at high ISO.

The images replayed on the camera looked much as they always have as the jpg was used to show them.

I was using a new sdhd card and when I tried to copy the files with a stardard sd card reader the jpg files on the card went west and only the raw files copied succesfully (ex direct camera connection). On converting the noisy raw image back to b&w it looked just as noisy as the colour version despite Lightroom's efforts to reduce noise.

A new sdhd card reader later and some recovery software and I have the original b&w jpg's to view. They are significantly less noisy right out of the box.

I am now starting to see why that article on dpreview on noisy small sensor cameras might be on a track that I could not then understand. At that point I was taking jpg iimages almost exclusively.

Where I stand at the moment: the GX100 and the GR-D must process image noise internally in their jpg recording (no news here) and not for their raw files. The noise in their raw files is higher than that in the processed jpg files. Where the difference lies is in what has been described as "film like grain". The software designers at Ricoh Inc when faced with how to deal with noise seem to have opted for mottling or softening noise to give that film-like look rather than smearing detail as other camera manufacturers often do.

It is a case of retaining detail at the expense of leaving some low level noise rather than trying to kill noise altogether. After all it is relatively easy to apply your own further noise reduction to remove Ricoh soft-grain than it is to bring back high level noise reduction smearing to an image that has had its detail removed.

What I will need to check further is why it is so hard to process the noisy raw image back to something similar to the same capture jpg image. Ricoh's noise processing algorythm for its high-ISO jpg images must be fairly effective.

In the meantime others can try a native jpg b&w against a raw capture inthe same conditions processed back to a b&w image.

This pheonomenon is not something that is going to be of much debate or interest simply because not many choose the b&w route these days.

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Tom Caldwell

gotheknights said:

You might remember Tom I posted a comparison between RAW and large
JPEG images shot at 100 ISO just after taking delivery of my GX100
a week or so ago. I was confused at the time about how noisy the
RAW images were in comparison to JPEG.

Click to expand...

Now that you remind me - yes

My other images form Sunday were taken in good light and the noise was not apparent. I think we are basically agreed. Raw gives more room after the event to play with the images. However I do note that I take my dslr images exclusively in raw these days and have been taking my small-camera images in jpg. Room to make a decision yet but so far I feel that there is much more relative benefit in tarting up a good light raw from a small sensor camera or any-raw from a dslr than there is in trying to de-noise a low-light image from the former. At the moment my money is on Ricoh's own de-noising algorythm even if only for low-light b&w images. Gives a nice "look".

gotheknights said:

Still, I believe that for any 'serious' imaging, RAW is the way to
go. I can easily tidy up the noise and I firmly believe that the
RAW image is superior overall
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Cheers
Tony

Click to expand...

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Tom Caldwell

Paul

Yes I agree with you. I have not yet attacked the raw image converted by Lightroom to b&w with anything other than Lightroom's own noise reduction.

Something to look at more closely.

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Tom Caldwell

These are not technically high quality images but are meant to illustrate what I have been sayiing:

This is the accompanying jpg b&w image - cropped but otherwise straight from the camera



This is the raw image that was taken in b&w mode but captured in colour and then converted to b&w thorugh Lightroom using fairly high noise reduction settings.



Obviously Ricoh's own noise reduction when capturing b&w images at high ISO is quite effective.

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Tom Caldwell

Tom Caldwell said:

This is the raw image that was taken in b&w mode but captured in
colour and then converted to b&w thorugh Lightroom using fairly
high noise reduction settings.

Click to expand...

Tom Caldwell said:

Obviously Ricoh's own noise reduction when capturing b&w images at
high ISO is quite effective.

Click to expand...

Obviously Ricoh is doing a good job at removing noise in an unobtrusive way. Totally different than Panasonic's Venus III approach which results in JPEGs that suffer from detail smearing at anything over ISO100. Noise isn't so much a problem rather the character of it. The image you converted has a blotchyness to it, whereas Ricoh's out-of-camera JPEG somehow managed to change the noise to a fine grain. Is the amount of preserved detail the same?

I would experiment a little myself, but the GX100 still isn't available here. I think it will take some time to figure out how to achieve pleasing results from higher ISO RAW files. But even at ISO80 or 100, shooting RAW will give you more dynamic range in scenes with high contrast, like in my LX2 example above (incidentally, the converted RAW file has just as much detail in the rock areas, you just can't see it because I didn't apply much sharpening).

But for those scenes that don't have an excessive amount of contrast, I might end up deciding that I quite like Ricoh's out-of-camera JPEGs. What I've seen so far appeals to me: the JPEGs look quite natural.

Björn

galleries: http://www.pbase.com/viztyger

Interesting stuff. Basically the difference that needs to be tested is between the in-camera RAW to JPG conversion (Ricoh's RAW converter), and the other aftermarket RAW converters.

If Ricoh is like the other companies, then I would imagine that their RAW conversion in-camera should follow the one they provide in the software disk that comes with the camera. I have not installed the Ricoh software, since I just plug in the camera directly to my PC.

Tom, if I read correctly, you convert from colour to BW first, and then apply noise reduction? I would think it would be better the other way around, that is, denoise first, and convert later.

viztyger said:

But for those scenes that don't have an excessive amount of
contrast, I might end up deciding that I quite like Ricoh's
out-of-camera JPEGs. What I've seen so far appeals to me: the JPEGs
look quite natural.

Click to expand...

Yes and they record much quicker and do not generally need any pp work unless you are trying to get rid of grain altogether. In b&w it seems jpg might be the best way to go.

viztyger said:

Björn

galleries: http://www.pbase.com/viztyger

Click to expand...

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Tom Caldwell

paulobiz said:

Interesting stuff. Basically the difference that needs to be tested
is between the in-camera RAW to JPG conversion (Ricoh's RAW
converter), and the other aftermarket RAW converters.

Click to expand...

Good point

paulobiz said:

Tom, if I read correctly, you convert from colour to BW first, and
then apply noise reduction? I would think it would be better the
other way around, that is, denoise first, and convert later.

Click to expand...

Yes I did do it the wrong way around - what you say makes sense. I have hardly tested this out and will have to try a greater variety of images before any real conclusions are reached.

At this stage it is just "an interesting first observation" and not a conclusion.

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Tom Caldwell