Learning why people use Raw

[JosephScha]

Here, in a very brief nutshell, is what I've learned. If the camera's auto white balance was always perfect, I doubt many people would shoot raw, because we can adjust contrast levels etc for in camera jpg. But white balance is different. Once a picture has been converted to JPEG, with the Gamma curve imposed and each color represented by 8 bits, it is pretty much impossible to make major corrections to white balance. I know, I've tried in the past. On top of that, you get to play with black level, brightness, and noise reduction ... it's really powerful and amazing to me. But I think white balance = color temperature is the key adjustment.

So this past weekend was my wife's mother's 80th birthday and there was a celebration in her house. In that house, the kitchen is lit by cool florescent, the dining room by incandescent, and the room with the TV is lit by a floor standing lamp with warm florescent bulbs, and a yellowed shade. In short, the lighting differs dramatically. So I shot raw + jpeg, and figured I'd get my first real use (not just practice) with ACR.

It turns out the the camera did rather well with cool florescent and really well with incandescent; I didn't even bother to mess with some of the .rw2 files. But it was WAY off and inconsistent (by a couple of hundred degrees in color temperature) in the room with the warm florescent under the yellowed lampshade.

Below are two versions of one of the worst jpegs. The lamp with the yellowed shade is off to the rigt. The first version is the out of camera jpeg, the second is the ACR conversion from .rw2. Shot at ISO 800, AWB, G10 with kit lens. (The couple are friends of my wife's parents).

out of camera JPEG:



From .rw2, using ACR in PSE 9:



By the way, at ISO 800 in ACR I raised Luminance noise suppression to 35 or 40, that really got rid of the noise. Chroma noise reduction default is 25, I left that alone. I did once reduce it to 0 to see that there was indeed chroma noise; 25 gets rid of it.

 

[Gavin Stapleton]

These days I shoot RAW 100% of the time. Although I should learn to switch back to JPG when just taking test shots... But quite often under artificial lighting, I have to adjust the WB manually in PP to get the results I want. Even then, Olympus' tendency towards warm colours adds a gold hue in trees in natural sunny conditions. In this case I often just manually set the WB to the "sunny" setting in PP. About half the time I see no difference, and just leave it as is.

 

[photoSmart42]

If the camera's auto white balance was always perfect, I doubt many people would shoot raw, because we can adjust contrast levels etc for in camera jpg.

Nothing to do with white balance. Shooting RAW is all about getting the most information from your digital sensor, and not relying on the in-camera compression engine to make what it thinks the image should look like. With RAW images, you can extract at least one full stop of data from the image, you get wider dynamic range, and you can still get the tonality you want by a few simple adjustments.

I shoot both RAW and JPEG because I use the JPEGs as a quick preview for what the final image may look like once I'm done processing it, and also if I find myself too lazy to process a bunch of stuff for posting on the web. All my keepers and prints are processed from RAW.

 

[exdeejjjaaaa]

Once a picture has been converted to JPEG, with the Gamma curve imposed and each color represented by 8 bits, it is pretty much impossible to make major corrections to white balance. I know, I've tried in the past.

and I just tried that a minute ago w/ your in camera JPG



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[Mike Ronesia]

Much better but if you are going to PP which I always do then why not have all the data. I am a raw only shooter and unless things change drastically I always will be.
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It's easier to ask for forgiveness then to ask for permission.

 

[thorkilry]

Once a picture has been converted to JPEG, with the Gamma curve imposed and each color represented by 8 bits, it is pretty much impossible to make major corrections to white balance. I know, I've tried in the past.

and I just tried that a minute ago w/ your in camera JPG



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And it did not work well for you....

--

http://www.flickr.com/photos/satyrium_w/
E 620,E 51o 2x kit, EX 25, 35mm, 5omm; EC2o,
7o-3oo, 50-200, panaTz7, E-pl1,VF-2 ,14-42mm m4/3,mf 35mm f 1.7 SLRM.
some old manuel focusing lenses.

 

[Kolen]

One thing bother me is video. In video we don't have RAW. So though I shot RAW only on my E-PL1, when the GH2 arrive (if it will..) I need to care about JPEG again because I am going to start shooting video with it.

 

[Gavin Stapleton]

Get a WB 18% grey card, and manually set prior to taking video.

One thing bother me is video. In video we don't have RAW. So though I shot RAW only on my E-PL1, when the GH2 arrive (if it will..) I need to care about JPEG again because I am going to start shooting video with it.

 

[Kolen]

Get a WB 18% grey card, and manually set prior to taking video.

Thanks. Just bought it and it arrived today. Though how it renders color is also important. There are so many different subtle setting to change the color (or something related to video IQ, like noise reduction and sharpening), and it is good and bad. Good that I can tweak it to get the best. Bad that there is a steep learning curve.

My GH2 haven't arrived yet. Once it arrived I will play with its JPEG engine a lot and ask questions here. You know, I never have to worry about it on E-PL1 when I shot video. Its JPEG engine is so nice that almost the only thing matters is the right white balance.

 

[JCB123]

Shooting RAW is the best way to ensure that you can get the white balance as you want it. Not using AWB is also a good habit, because AWB gives inconsistant results. It is taking it best guess at what the colours in a scene are but since it doesn't actually know what the colours are it frequently gets it a little off. If you are shooting JPEGs (and its best to get it right in-camera when shooting RAW too) you'll get better consistency using the presets or a custom wb setting.

Regards
John

 

[Charles Pike]

My publishers will not accept a jpeg, so I only shoot raw and when I bring it into LR3 is is downloaded as a dng. Then after working on file I save those I am going to submit to a magazine as a tiff. I have never shot jpeg. But that was because I came from a film background and you wanted the very best negative that you could get. Also, I have been able to go back to files that I shot 5 years ago and get better results from those files. Better software and my learning more on how to use that software. Your stuck with what you have when you shoot jpeg.

It is a lot like the difference you get from working in your own darkroom or sending your film off the the drug store. Not nearly the same results.

http://www.photosbypike.com

 

[beomagi]

I'll have to agree with exdeejjjaaaa - this isn't too big of a difference, and can be further corrected. I'm betting he did push button auto white balance.

You're correct, but it's not the whole picture. Your raw white balance should come out smoother than JPG - the colors/contrast is off a little here. Reason is when you start adjusting JPG color, the integers leave histogram gaps in between them.

Another reason, is off white balance in RAW can be shown as 0/255 in the JPG, for a particular channel leaving no room to fix. The RAW however, may have more headroom.

I'm not knocking the photo - It's color is well processed, and yes, RAW is better in general but in this case, it's not as huge as if there were more extreme lighting. What you're really going to benefit from is smother gradients as you don't have the histogram gaps color corrected JPG can leave you with here.

He has less contrast in the face, which look a little funky - but it also appears you have a greenish cast to them.

Once a picture has been converted to JPEG, with the Gamma curve imposed and each color represented by 8 bits, it is pretty much impossible to make major corrections to white balance. I know, I've tried in the past.

and I just tried that a minute ago w/ your in camera JPG



--

And it did not work well for you....

--

http://www.flickr.com/photos/satyrium_w/
E 620,E 51o 2x kit, EX 25, 35mm, 5omm; EC2o,
7o-3oo, 50-200, panaTz7, E-pl1,VF-2 ,14-42mm m4/3,mf 35mm f 1.7 SLRM.
some old manuel focusing lenses.

 

[Porkins Wingman]

I don't currently have the expertise or need to get the most (or anything like) out of RAW PP, but an immediate aspect about it to me using my GH1 is that I can brush over the sky in an image where the sky is over exposed to recover that is lost at the limit of the dynamic range in jpeg.

I can see noise adjustments also being useful to me, but I would say white balance is actually relatively unimportant to me. Generally speaking I don't find white balance affects whether a picture looks nice or not, it just affects how accurate a record of the real world my photo was in terms of colour.

 

[exdeejjjaaaa]

He has less contrast in the face, which look a little funky - but it also appears you have a greenish cast to them.

I had a crippled .JPG to start with and I spent a minute... w/ the normal out of camera JPG (not resized and not severely compressed) and a little more time you can get much better correction

disclaimer: I neither use in camera jpg myself nor advocate the use of in camera jpg.

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[jimboyvr]

Don't lynch me but generally speaking I only use RAW inside or low light.

I find not so much difference in jpg/raw taking shots outside in good light.

When less then ideal situations..RAW saves it.

 

[exdeejjjaaaa]

And it did not work well for you....

it worked well enough for the severely resized and compressed JPG that was posted by OP... plus I did not spend a lot time to postprocess... the point was - you can fix certain things w/ JPG files, not 100% of what you can do w/ raw files - but a lot, just in case if you do not have any alternative and have to fix in camera jpgs

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[drwho9437]

The main reason to use RAW is that a CCD/CMOS sensor is linear and your eyes are logarithmic. JPEGs map the linear data via a tone curve. This results in compression (mapping more than one linear value to the same RGB value). This means there is less information in a JPEG in terms of the dynamic range available. This is why you should always shoot RAW. A correction to the exposure will always be better with RAW.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbryce/

 

[Dr Hal]

One of the biggest advantages of live view is the fact that you can set the wb using the kelvin temp and watch it change to what you want. There is no excuse for using auto wb when you have live view. If you are that lazy, then you get what you deserve.

Hal

 

[Kopend05]

Personally i shoot RAW because of WB adjustment + the superior resolution and NR control , lightroom 3 will give me far better results then any ooc jpegs

 

[florinandrei]

You could do color corrections on JPEG as well. It may not look too bad if you do it right. You may not have as much freedom as with RAW, but tweaks are doable anyway.

But the real reason why people shoot RAW is that there's so much more information contained, information that is lost when you convert to JPEG.

This becomes especially obvious when you develop RAW and you do a "Fill Light" to lift the shadows, or a "Recover" to dissolve a little the washed-out highlights. This works pretty well in RAW, but only poorly (if at all) in JPEG.

I develop RAW with Lightroom, and I use pretty much the entire toolbar on the right-hand side, depending on the case. Some pictures are near-perfect so no corrections are necessary, but others are really hopeless cases so a lot of processing is required. After a while, you learn which controls work better in certain situations.

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/