John TF wrote:
Obviously your technique works very well - your images speak for themselves. The image quality is consistently impressive and appealing - thanks as always.
OTOH.... It is hard (especially for control nuts - looking at me) to knowingly give up any image quality at all. So with every JPEG shutter click there is that “Oh dear, maybe I could have squeezed out two percent more...” moment.
Hi John!
I think that dealing with soft transitions with skies is the only reason I'm ever tempted to shoot Raw. Even then, I often don't bother. But I've seen some results from another member here over a decade ago that caught my eye. He only shot RAW. The results were beautiful.
One of the great values of the images you post is to demonstrate that in the real world, clinging to this concern at a time when DIGIC is so mature and capable is pointless for the great majority of us. The fact is, DIGIC can typically do it at least as well as we can, as you show. Since you also leave room for tweaking at a subtle level that JPEG’s can handle without falling apart, you have the best of both worlds.
So many DLSR photographers who use their cameras professionally are now shooting JPEG because they find the image quality beyong their ability to edit their RAW images to the same level... and they acknowledge that downloading a JPEG from the camera still allows plenty of editing room without any noticable loss of image quality when saving their edited JPEG images. The shots that come out of the cameras these days are almost like TIFFs so you can keep the original as a template and then edit copied with no noticeable loss of image quality. Only capturing in RAW to begin with will allow you a little more space to work. I think Wedding Photographers (who are often faced with the challenge of photographing white fabrics and reflected surfaces in bright sunlight) have the best excuse to continue to shoot RAW. And the brides themselves are keeping up with them by demanding copies of the unedited RAW images for their friends to edit for them ...and to get someone to remove blemishes etc that they don't want to employ the photographer to do.
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This is what I'm doing for my own archives...
For my own method, I devised a similar "pipeline" for the film industry and it works very well for me today. I download the photographs from the memory card to my computer and store them in a Master folder using a date system (see below) that can be reverse searched on any computer. Each Master folder is in consecutive order by date and then a title (to help identify the contents) is added. Scrolling down my PICTURE folder (where pictures are stored on my computer) I can look for specific events or subjects at a glance.
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MASTER FOLDER (date and name of event) - eg "2019.05.14 _CATS+lunch+Car"
------- EOS M6 FOLDER - (original JPEGS from camera for archiving)
------- TIFF/PSD FOLDER (large lossless files for editing and/or archiving)
------- FINALS FOLDER (these are the edited + reduced image files from the TIFFs.)
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Inside each of these Master folders contains three or more sub-folders. One is for original JPEG images (eg EOS M6) and then there's one for edited images from Lightroom (TIFF/SPD). When editing images the TIFFs and PSDs with layers are retained as a master copy in their parent folder. Finally, when my images are ready to be saved for the Web or to post or email them, I'll save them off as JPEGs in the folder titled "FINALS". You'll notice I've added the letter "L" to my edited JPEG images. This enables me to tell at a glance if I'm looking at an edited copy or an original. You'll see one image below has an LP on it. That stands for "Large Panorama". Otherwise, the "L" tells me I saved the image at either 2000 or 2500 pixels wide ("L" stands for "Large copy"). I used the save my images at about 1400 pixels wide and those were denoted with an "S" for small.
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This is just my method of processing and saving images. If the edit I did was complicated or I wish to save a large image as a TIFF or PSD with layers, I'll usually label the image as IMG_1111XL.psd (for example). This warns me that the image is Extra Large (full sized).
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Most people won't be this organized but it's easy for me to search back and find important images now that I'm taking more pictures and sometimes need to dig through hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of images running back ten to twenty years. I try to back up all my shots on two mirrored hard drives every few months (which is risky enough with that length of delay). I had a hard drive fail once and manged to resurrect it like a zombie ...and pulled all my image files off it successfully. I pray it never happens again.
Combine that with the very large number of images one can now generate in a short time, and having the camera do as much as possible becomes even more attractive. I would rather leave editing large piles of RAW’s to the pros; I don’t have the time or patience. A wedding photographer needs every last bit of maneuverability - I don’t. The challenge is remembering this instead of flicking over to the RAW setting!
You argued well for this point years ago, but with current DIGIC it becomes an even more forceful argument.
I think that images from Canon's DiGiC! processors reached maturity around 2004. This was when Canon released the PowerShot Pro1 with it's fixed L-series lens and a boasted ability to produce print-ready images straight out of the camera. But we're seeing such excellence in JPEG image quality today that I'm still impressed by what these cameras can spit out. The sort-of-recent Canon G1X was a successor to the Pro1 and the image quality was excellent. This was the first PowerShot that allowed me to lift shadow detail effectively and without noticeable lost of image quality. I have recently realized that I have set my own camera up to avoid overexposing images but everyone's method will probably work for them. I'm wary of pushing my own setting to others in case it is in competition with their own preferences and shooting styles.
In my case, there is another side to it too. I won’t subscribe, and LR6 is inevitably aging and beginning to fail; catalogs get messed up very easily. It is scary. I am amazed you can still work with version 4. So I am going to switch to ACDSee which now combines a DAM and most LR and Photoshop features in a single app. But since I have no experience yet with the results of its RAW processing, especially regarding color, letting Canon do it as a JPEG in DIGIC makes lots of sense.
My version 4 of LR is actually kind of buggy. If I'm trying to import a number of images at once it often drops some of them and only imports a single image. There's also one feature that doesn't seem to work in relation to CA correction. But it's useful for basic NR and color tweaks.
I don’t think that a JPEG necessarily locks one into a particular “look”. That comes more from composing and exposing the image... Save RAW for special and unusual conditions... But this digresses back to a very old discussion....
You're right. And the secret to nice looking photographs usually comes down to composition and especially the light in the scene. Beautiful lighting often brings pictures to life. Bad lighting kills any shot. I'm still open minded to using RAW. I'll tell you what... I'll try to shoot a few this weekend at a birthday party. No idea what I'll get but I'll try to shoot alongside JPEG (just in case).
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I'm concerned with what Adobe is doing with restrictions and discontinuations etc. It's for this reason I'm forced to run an older version on my computer. But most of my motivation for doing this is that upgrading to the latest OS on my computer cancels out my Photoshop version as well as Lightroom and any Pluggins I paid for. To make matters even worse, the upgrade to a newer OS results in my computer speakers shutting down or crackling... as well as file types not opening with shortcuts. I'm sorry but Apple has failed me one time too many. I'm looking at alternatives with both my computer and my editing software. Canon's native software for RAW conversion has a few cool uses but I'm thinking of upgrading my entire computer in the near future. The one I'm using now is getting past its life expectancy. Not sure what the solution will be for me because Photoshop is almost like an old friend to me. Guess I'll just have to adapt..
