CCD jpeg vs CCD RAW

Similar to the CCD vs CMOS thread, and in regards to others questioning Jpeg vs RAW here is a comparison I have picked up on recently with regards to such aspects as color rendition straight out the camera of jpegs.

Up until my recent acquirements of an old Fuji S5 Pro (Super CCD) and Nikon D40 (also CCD) I have been exclusively shooting RAW on my D5500.

However, noticing the true-to-life (film-like) colors on the Fuji S5 - actually this is what it is known for, which is one of the reasons I bought it - these wonderful images are usually attained straight out of camera, jpeg. Similarly with the D40's in-camera output. Dabbling with these camera's RAW files can lead to unnecessary time trying to achieve similar results, only in vain. So, go back to shooting Jpeg? No. Jpeg + RAW.




D40 straight out of camera




D40 - RawTherapee




D40 - darktable




D40 - Capture NX-D






D40 - straight out of camera






D40 - RawTherapee



Moral of the story, only manufacturer's own supplied processing software is able to even come close to in-camera jpeg.
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Bringing to light, Exposing what is
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*Fuji S5 Pro - sooc




*Fuji S5 Pro - RawTherapee, here saturation was necessarily added.



*As this is the Nikon forum maybe we shouldn't be discussing Fuji here? But again, only able to achieve Fuji's "known for" colors using their own supplied software.
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Bringing to light, Exposing what is
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My feeling is that those old cameras had to deal with low DR and high noise, so they used different exposures (my D70 exposes 1/3 to 1 stop darker than my D7200), tone curves etc to make the best of the (relatively) poor informations coming from the sensor. That leads to a different, underexposed and more saturated vibe.

Newer cameras have massive DR and almost no noise to deal with, so the photos can be exposed hotter and JPG engines can recover informations from both highlights and shadows, which leads to less saturated photos OOC. Modern raw development softwares seem to be biased towards this trend too.

Again, this is just my opinion, and it's just a feeling, I may very well be completely wrong. And it's restricted to Nikons, I never used a Fuji S.

The Fuji S5 Pro is hands down my favourite camera. I've got a D500, a D7200, a D7100, and a D7000, but none of them have anything like the S5 Pro's colour reproduction, which is just fantastic. For general photography up to 1080P res in good light, the S5 is still my go-to camera.

However, I was actually never all that bothered about the JPEG colour vs. what I could get out of the raws. The white balance tends towards green, leading to slightly cyan skies, so I'd either need to use manual WB when shooting, or shoot raw. One of the S5's greatest strengths is the highlight DR, but that's not really accessible with JPEGs, so shooting raw makes a lot more sense to me.

I suppose the S5 is a bit of an odd duck these days. While the newer cameras are all about dragging DR out of the shadows, the S5 was all about highlight DR (thanks to the S+R pixels). The downside was that on extreme recovery, highlights would get quite noisy , and if you go too far (perhaps depending on your software), the channels don't blow out simultaneously, and you end up with magenta rather than white. No big deal.

Personally, I use Photoshop ACR for processing S5 Pro .RAFs. It work really well, and I always get what I want out of the images.

I tried a Fuji X-T1 a while back, hoping it would produce as nice colours as the S5 Pro while obviously having more resolution, but I was actually a little disappointed. When it comes to the S5 Pro, you can't teach the old dog any new tricks, but that's o.k, because the old tricks are still pretty magical!

If only it had more than 6 megapixels!!!

You've found out exactly what I found out with my D40 and D60. Just shoot jpegs on Vivid and forget processing the raws.

EE-TV said:

Similar to the CCD vs CMOS thread, and in regards to others questioning Jpeg vs RAW here is a comparison I have picked up on recently with regards to such aspects as color rendition straight out the camera of jpegs.

Click to expand...

This is just opinion, of course, but my gut feel is that the limited dynamic range of older CCD-era cameras maps very straightforwardly over to the lower dynamic ranges of our screens and prints. Newer cameras produce so much dynamic range that their JPEG engines struggle to map it 1:1 with our output media. As a result it can often look less contrasty, more HDR-like, and flatter. Ming Thein pretty much concluded the same thing recently.

EE-TV said:

Up until my recent acquirements of an old Fuji S5 Pro (Super CCD) and Nikon D40 (also CCD) I have been exclusively shooting RAW on my D5500.

However, noticing the true-to-life (film-like) colors on the Fuji S5 - actually this is what it is known for, which is one of the reasons I bought it - these wonderful images are usually attained straight out of camera, jpeg. Similarly with the D40's in-camera output. Dabbling with these camera's RAW files can lead to unnecessary time trying to achieve similar results, only in vain. So, go back to shooting Jpeg? No. Jpeg + RAW.

Moral of the story, only manufacturer's own supplied processing software is able to even come close to in-camera jpeg.

Click to expand...

I must say I also preferred your SOOC results over your renditions from RAW here. When I compare my own S5 Pro SOOC results to the RAW conversions it's often a similar experience for me...

fPrime

--
Half of my heart is a shotgun wedding to a bride with a paper ring,
And half of my heart is the part of a man who's never truly loved anything.