RAW is better..how?

FilmNot said:

My experience has shown that there is very little difference between
raw and jpeg, and that using raw is really only good for keeping more
pixels in the image and possibly getting a tiny bit more detail.

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Possibly? No.

FilmNot said:

Personally, I think using PS Shadows and Highlights is as good a
lifesaver as processing the image in a much more clumsy tool like ACR
or even Lightbox, which is cool and all, but doesn't have all the
things I need to do serious processing.

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Im not a fan of lightbox and havent demo'd ACR, but use use DPP and bridge for batching out images and then open as smart objects or psds.

so I'm forced to go to PS

Eventually.

FilmNot said:

anyway, which converts to JPEG.

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See above.

FilmNot said:

The only reason I've started using raw is because, as someone
mentioned, the computer has beeter algorythyms than the camera, and
will do a better job at things like sharpening.

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What about the archival properties of backing up a raw file for the future.

I don't want to deal

FilmNot said:

with tiff images, either.

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why would you?

Files are too big, and I'm not sure you

FilmNot said:

really get that much more out of a tiff versus a large jpeg.

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Thats open for debate or maybe another post.

Best,

Andy

T3 said:

T3 wrote:

nanook s said:

Or one could just have exposed for 1/3 to 1/2 stop less when taking
the shot

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No, because then that simply causes other problems. In fact, for
this shot, I had already dialed in 1/3 underexposure because I knew I
was probably going to have some problems in the highlights with the
sun shining as it was. And even with that, I got some highlight
clipping. The point is, in the heat of shooting, you're never going
to avoid clipping 100%. Sure, it's easy for armchair idiots to say,
"then, if 1/3 wasn't enough, you should have exposed for 1/2 or 2/3
stop less when taking the shot."

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I find it laughable that the position even needs to be defended. I agree with you and this is a CLASSIC example of when to use RAW. One can WB bracket and exposure bracket and carry relectors and strobes and any myriad of items or if you are in a challenging situation you can safety-net it by shooting RAW.

I shoot about 50/50 JPEG and RAW and who the heck are you folks to tell me when and how I should use my camera. The camera changes settings for a reason. And, if we are competing in the same space for the same customers and you thought you were using a better technique than me, it seems you'd care even less if you thought I was doing it right.

I love to discuss the whens, hows, and techniques, and yes we will disagree at times, but T3 offered a very good situation where Raw pays off.

I have a variable speed drill, but I bet you there are folks in this forum that would say, don't use all the speeds, back in the 30's we drilled by hand at one speed and you get better bore control without using multiple speeds.

Guess what folks, things change and get better. Even with the new Digic III processor and the fact that more and more programs offer better control of JPEGs there will still be times when using RAW pays off. There will also be times when using JPEG for faster and longer burst rates or even just faster time to market will pay off. And, more importantly there will be times when it really doesn't matter.

Use ALL of your camera the way it was designed. On my menu I have RAW and about 12 other setings some with Raw some just JPEG, not just JPEG and off or Raw and Off. It was designed that way, not an engineering oversight.

--
BrianH

Nanook, are you saying that you shoot jpeg exclusively in your 2-300K shot a year studio?

Best,

Andy

Let me understand this, you are opposed to shooting RAW because as a professional photographer you never make mistakes in exposure settings so every picture you take is perfect. You have to be kidding. Do you do any post-processing or is every picture you take perfectly cropped and saturated too?

It sounds like you are just too cheap to buy some extra memory cards so you can shoot RAW/JPEG, and are using ignorance and arrogance as the justification for it. Most pro's are realistic enough to acknowledge that mistakes can happen and that even someone as perfect as yourself could make a mistake. I would never let someone I know hire a professional photographer that only shot JPEG.

I think he is say he don't need raw, he can do what he needs with jpeg. That it's a give and take, and he needs what jpegs give more then what raw gives.

I think that lot of people would not cut it with films these day, everyone depends on the cam and software to do what they don't want to. Where does it end, when people feel it's dumb because some one uses just jpeg.

It's not wrong at all, if you know your cam and are use it really good. It will become part of you, you'll know what settings it needs for what and when. People are forgetting there some people, that can do that and make the right choices every time just about.

If I shot 300,000 per year I'd shot jpeg all the time, with that many shot under your belt your going know your cam. Our lenses as well, and the settings like the back of your hand. If you don't that some thing is wrong, I shot all raw but I got time and only pick my best shot to work on.

I want every drop from my photos, and what to have the most choices. Cam slow down using raw lots of times, not that it matters to everyone but to some it does. People act liek you can't fix jpegs if needed, it just not so I can do very close to jpeg as I can raw.

People say it easy to use raw, but the fact is if your messing up one setting will not work for them all. So then your stuck adjusting them by them selfs anyways, and with lots of photos it take time. If your not messing that much, then you gain very little. And you can still work on some in jpeg, I can tell you the different raw converters. Make the same raw photo look different then each other, with the right jpeg and settings.

You can set your photos the way you want them in cam, you can then down load them to any system. And they are going to look pretty good, even with different views they look pretty much the same. There is nothing wrong with jpeg, nor is there anything wrong with raw. It's really about what each person wants most, and what works for there style of shooting.

Also one must remember, if some one is coming from film jpeg may well seem better. There are people that don't want to mess with photoshop, no more then they have to at all. That is all right as well, the finished shots is all that matter really. Me now I can't live with out raw, or photoshop as I use them all the time and love them. But not everyone is the same, nor should they try to be the same as everyone else.
--
My psig photos
http://www.photosig.com/go/users/userphotos?id=169695
Free Fun Arcade Games
http://www.arcadegamester.net

timpa42 said:

Also one must remember, if some one is coming from film jpeg may well
seem better. There are people that don't want to mess with photoshop,
no more then they have to at all.

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This is the whole myth about RAW: RAW does not need any more processing than jpeg: if some super human photographer shoots jpegs that never, ever need any adjustment, then their RAW files wouldn't need any adjustment either: they come out the same, only with all the original information intact.

Considering that my studio covers 80-100 weddings a year, of which 50-60 involve myself as the lead photographer, I'm not sure who's the "armchair idiot" that you are referring to. Experience counts. What's next? someone advocating that we should all shoot continuously all the time at 24 frames per second because you can never be sure the single shots get the expressiong right?

There is no dynamic range difference between JPEG and RAW. The same dynamic range, just sliced differently.

I actually agree with you point. RAW and JPEG are just tools . . . a pair of tools out of many. I simply take take exception to the position that all pros should be shooting RAW all the time . . . obviously, those "armchair idiots" have no clue what it's like running a busy studio that shoot 200,000-300,000 frames a year. If you spend all your time dealing with the data flow as a consequence of shooting all RAW, corners would have to be cut somewhere else that are potentially more important to the clients. . . such as data security!

I'd say, for myself, about 100k-120k out of the 200k-300k total, 98-99% is JPEG. The remaining 100k-180k from assistants (number varies depending on the year) is about 10-25% RAW at capture. New assistants on try-outs are told to use RAW only, and their pictures are seldomly useful anyway, so after picking out a handful per assignment, can be discarded.

nanook s said:

There is no dynamic range difference between JPEG and RAW. The same
dynamic range, just sliced differently.

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That makes absolutely no sense at all. You cannot recover dynamic range from a jpeg the same way you can from a RAW file. We all know that. So, if you are shooting a scene that has a 7 stop range you are content to let the camera decide what 5 stops or so you are willing to keep?

I contend that, in fact, even when you shoot jpegs you are actually shooting RAW, but are content to let the camera's software decide what is relevant and what is not. You are doing a RAW conversion to jpeg on every single frame. You have simply decided to give up control of the process and let the camera do it for you. That is the equivalent of dropping film off at the lab and whatever the proofs look like is just fine with you. For a wedding photographer this is probably just the facts of how things are done. I would agree that if your workflow is getting you where you need to be then leave it be. However, the notion that RAW DR and jpeg DR are the same thing it totally ludicrous.

For a more exacting commercial location shooter, working in high contrast lighting, jpeg is not an option at all.

--

'We spend all of our lives pushing the buttons and pulling the levers found on the front panel of reality. How can we be so certain that there is also not a rear panel... one that only God can reach, and when He does flip an unseen switch or turn a dial that is out of our reach we see it as a Miracle?' JR
http://www.jimroofcreative.com

In case you can't read, one of the first things I said was that "In a studio setting, you have a lot more control."

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1014&message=25574333

You have controlled lighting, you have control of contrast, you have lighting consistency from shot to shot, etc, etc. In the outside world, you don't nearly have as much control as you do in a studio. In a studio setting, you could literally shoot an entire 200,000/300,000-shot years worth of shooting on one exposure setting, without having to worry about fluctuations in WB, or contrast, or exposure, etc. Just set it up and shoot the same way the whole entire year. But if you think that the outside world is going to have that same degree of consistency from one shot to the next, you're dead wrong. So don't try to apply your 200,000-300,000 studio shots to the outside, dynamic world where things are a lot more unpredictable and a lot less ideal. Hey, if all I ever did was shoot studio, I'd shoot JPEGs all day long too. Just set it (exposure, ISO, WB, JPEG) and forget it. That's easy. Once you set everything up, even a monkey can press the shutter button all day long, 300,000 times a year. But move out into a different setting, a dynamic setting like the outside world, and suddenly you need to be a little more flexible, and it helps to have a capture format that is also a little more flexible-- hence, RAW.

nanook s said:

I actually agree with you point. RAW and JPEG are just tools . . . a
pair of tools out of many. I simply take take exception to the
position that all pros should be shooting RAW all the time . . .
obviously, those "armchair idiots" have no clue what it's like
running a busy studio that shoot 200,000-300,000 frames a year. If
you spend all your time dealing with the data flow as a consequence
of shooting all RAW, corners would have to be cut somewhere else that
are potentially more important to the clients. . . such as data
security!

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"I had already dialed in 1/3 underexposure . . ."

I'm sorry, but that sentence is meaningless without knowing:
1. what metering mode you are in
2. what you are metering on
3. what's the sensitivity bias of the sensor/film in your camera

4. which part of the scene you are trying to expose "spot-on," and how you weigh metering bias.

Look at the scene again, and apply the Zone System. Estimate how many zones are there . . . compared to how many stops your sensor/film captures, then decide on which zone you want to meter on . . . only then exposure bias dialing comes in only if necessary. Like I said before, RAW shooting by and large is being used as a crutch by those who need more rigorous photography practice.

I do use RAW very rarely, for one purpose: where available light and sensor sensivity is insufficient for a shutter speed that I need. It's the digital equivalent of pushing.

RAW is like shooting film. It takes proper exposure to get a good RAW file and it takes time to get the best image from the exposure in the final product.

JPG is like shooting Polaroids. You pretty much get what you get, with the small exception that there are some adjustments that can be applied after the fact.

Fact is, film is more forgiving that Polaroids. Does that mean that Polaroid shooters are superior because they 'have to get it right'? No. It means they are content to be locked into their exposure decisions.

The fact that is logically inescapable is this...

You can ALWAYS get the same image as a camera-generated JPG from a RAW file. Always.

You can not always get the same image from a JPG that you could from a RAW file. Shooting RAW expands the possibilities of the final image. Shooting JPG constrains your image to a narrow expression of what the camera saw.

Some are content with that. Others consider is lunacy to throw away any of the image data that the camera is capable of recording.

--

'We spend all of our lives pushing the buttons and pulling the levers found on the front panel of reality. How can we be so certain that there is also not a rear panel... one that only God can reach, and when He does flip an unseen switch or turn a dial that is out of our reach we see it as a Miracle?' JR
http://www.jimroofcreative.com

My studio takes 200,000-300,000 frames a year. 90+% of them are taken on-location at weddings. A typical senior portrait in studio nets only about 100 frames. A typical wedding on location results in 2000-3000 frames. So, yes, I'm very familiar with on-location work. Like I said, my studio covers 80-100 weddings a year, and I go to 50-60 of them personally.

nanook s said:

There is no dynamic range difference between JPEG and RAW. The same
dynamic range, just sliced differently.

Click to expand...

Sure. And the detail that was recovered from the RAW file, and which would have been irretrievable from a JPEG file, was simply conjured out of thin air, right?





The fact is, the RAW file had that data, available for retrieval. The JPEG file chopped that data off, never to be seen again. So effectively, RAW does store more dynamic range information than a JPEG file. That's how highlight recovery is made possible with a RAW file. Deny it all you want, but if you need to pull data out of bright highlight areas and inky dark shadow areas, a RAW file will be able to do it a heck of a lot better than a JPEG file because the RAW file hasn't tossed that data (if it was captured to begin with) whereas the JPEG file has.

nanook s said:

My studio takes 200,000-300,000 frames a year. 90+% of them are
taken on-location at weddings. A typical senior portrait in studio
nets only about 100 frames. A typical wedding on location results in
2000-3000 frames. So, yes, I'm very familiar with on-location work.
Like I said, my studio covers 80-100 weddings a year, and I go to
50-60 of them personally.

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Shoot what you want, if you actually do any shooting at all. Maybe you care more about volume than quality. So be it. But don't be arguing that a JPEG is just as good as a RAW file because, while in certain cases a JPEG is certainly good enough, it'll never give photographers the safety net that a RAW file does. You may not find RAW to be particularly valuable, but I can guarantee you that if any manufacturer ever removed RAW capability from a DSLR, there would be a HUGE outcry. Would the outcry be justified? Absolutely. Most photographers would never buy a DSLR that didn't have RAW, so valuable do they think it is. But I'm sure that your studio would snatch them up like hotcakes.

Of course I agree with you that the original capture is RAW regardless whether the person shoots in RAW mode or JPEG mode. The result just get mapped out differently.

I categorically disagree with you that the photographer has no control over which "5 stops" (actually more than that) to keep. The photographer controls which stops to keep by controlling exposure to begin with. That's where the zone system comes in.

The proper analogy is not dropping of at a drug store, but the difference between developing color film by hand or buying one of those machines from Kodak or Fuji for the studio. The machines can automaticly mix the chemicals and time it consistently . The emphasis is on Consistency. Once the pro knows the Consistency, i.e. what to expect, even if it is a consistent bias one way or another, the front end capture can be adjusted accordingly. Different RAW converters deliver different results, and the best RAW converter for image quality (when "rescueing" is not required) apparently are the ones from the manufacturers, using an algorithm that simulates what's in the camera hardware. So why bother monkeying with post instead of getting it right the first time (or the second time, after checking histogram

"Most photographers would never buy a DSLR that didn't have RAW, so valuable do they think it is."

Most wannabe photographers who waste too much time on forums instead of getting exposure skills perhaps. Most working pros shoot JPEG most of the time. Whether a camera is to be purchased or not is dependent on value/cost ratio. It's strictly business. If they offer 50% off a 1DsIII "crippleware" with RAW removed, yes, I'd snatch it up quickly, as most others would too. Many DSLR's already have much slower shooting speed for RAW than for JPG, so there.

nanook s said:

Like I said before, RAW shooting by and large is being used as a
crutch by those who need more rigorous photography practice.

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These ridiculous comments get so tedious!

You could equally make a case that jpegs are mostly for those who don't know how to optimise their workflow with RAW (the exception probably being those who do their processing and printing on location). The amount of extra time involved with RAW, using up to date software, is almost nil.

If your studio is based on quantity rather than quality then fine, but please don't get all superior to those who prefer to do things differently.

nanook s said:

"Most photographers would never buy a DSLR that didn't have RAW, so
valuable do they think it is."

Most wannabe photographers who waste too much time on forums instead
of getting exposure skills perhaps. Most working pros shoot JPEG
most of the time.

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What utter rubbish!