FZ200 Owners - Raw or JPEG?

[San Francisco Guy]

I currently have a ZS25 which I haven't actually owned that long. I've been investing a lot of time learning Lightroom, and I totally love it! Such a big improvement over iPhoto.

With my ZS25 I can only shoot in JPG, but with Lightroom there are many more post processing options available if you shoot in raw. I'm just curious to know how those of you who own the FZ200, which format do you shoot in and why?

I hope to buy the FZ200 in the coming weeks, not just for shooting in raw, but the 2.8f and the great zoom.

Thanks for your input!!

 

[richj20]

I shoot RAW + Jpeg. I find that most of the time, the Jpeg file suffices. I just returned from a trip and caught this lake scene as the sun was rising -- it paints the marshes and hasn't yet risen high enough to light up the mountains. I like the Panasonic colors a lot. This is the Jpeg from the camera:



This Blue Heron was enjoying watching out on the lake. Jpeg from the camera:



The RAW file often comes in handy, for example, when I have to adjust highlights or shadows, since the RAW files preserve more pixel information with which to work.

Here, I exposed for the sky/clouds detail and set curves on the foreground. I wanted to emphasize the flowers. I used fill flash for the sign. I wanted the sign for description in a series from this vantage point.



- Richard

 

[phototransformations]

Once memory cards an disk drive storage started to get cheap, I started shooing RAW+JPEG (JPEG set to Normal) for any camera I had that can shoot RAW. For well-lighted scenes at up to ISO 800, the JPEG is usually fine. But the RAW is there for scenes with more dynamic range than the JPEG can handle.

For higher ISOs. JPEGs shot at ISOs above 1600 start to look pretty funky, but with a little tweaking, ISO 3200 in RAW is fairly clean, and even ISO 6400 in RAW is usable. With this camera, RAW seems to give about a one-stop advantage once you get into the ISO stratosphere.

 

[SwatOx]

RAW & Jpeg. A great advantage of RAW is that when you edit in LR (or anything else), the editing is "non-destructive": i.e., the original RAW file is always there to be re-edited. With JPG, this isn't so. Now you could always make a duplicate of the original, but that is cumbersome. With large and relatively inexpensive SD cards now (e.g. 32gb), you can fit a lot of Jpg images and RAW files on a card. So I would recommend both for awhile....

I love my FZ200, and I'm sure you will, too.

 

[cainn24]

I'd love to shoot RAW 100% of the time but it absolutely murders continuous shooting performance. The FZ200 has a decent size buffer, but its write speeds are somewhat underwhelming (it can't benefit from high speed SD cards).


If I didn't need to use burst modes so often, it would be RAW all the way. The difference between the in-camera JPEG engine and well processed RAW output is quite significant, even when you tweak the former to reduce detail smearing.

 

[bruckshaw1]

Richard. In your first image do you think you might have been able to bring out more texture on the lake beach from RAW? Just a thought. But I like the image a lot.

Eric

 

[cainn24]

The biggest benefit, I think, is seen at higher ISOs: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/52878793

But here's a low ISO comparison too:


WB corrected, but otherwise SOOC


Developed from RAW with DxO Optics Pro

And here's a real-world example (since studio-style test scenes always occur in some sort of counterfeit alternate reality apparently):


FZ200+B-300 TC @ 1020mm (eff.), SOOC


Developed from RAW with DxO Optics Pro

This is certainly not one of my best bird shots, but as I rarely shoot RAW in such circumstances I had few to choose from for illustrative purposes. In any case, as you can see, developing from RAW is more about restoring a more organic look by employing superior noise reduction techniques. At least that's what I find most valuable anyway (since I rarely have exposure related issues). You could run the JPEG through neatimage as well if you like but in my experience cleaning up Panasonic JPEG engine artefacts isn't easy.

 

[sherman_levine]

Not much to add to what others have said.

I think you'll find the codec pack from here useful if you're running Windows.

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/

It's $9.99 for 3 workstations.

Lets you see thumbnails of FZ200 .RW2 files in Windowsxplorer

Sherm

 

[phazelag]

Same as others. Mostly Jpeg for burst mode, and time saving in processing. The Jpegs are excellent. I will shoot .raw for landscapes if I remember.

 

[Raghu_ambattur]

Thanks for this info, which I was not aware of. I have always thought RAW is for serious photogs who would want very high resolution for wall-size prints, and the few experiments I did with RAW (all of them in good day light) did not show much difference from JPEG.

 

[pcake]

i always shoot raw plus JPG. sometimes a pic will have something off - poor exposure or white balance, or will have blown out highlights or something like that. when you have the raw file, you can always fix it.

 

[Donald B]

thanks for the comparisons, it shows why I think raw is a waste of time.

cheers don

 

[phototransformations]

thanks for the comparisons, it shows why I think raw is a waste of time.

cheers don

 

[cainn24]

thanks for the comparisons, it shows why I think raw is a waste of time.

I can understand why you'd say that about the low ISO examples, because at typical LCD display sizes the difference is not obvious. However I don't think anyone could reasonably conclude the same about FZ200 ISO 1600 shots, like the one I linked to at the beginning of my post.

sherman_levine provided a quite striking real-world example of the same thing a couple of months ago when he posted some captures of a dance recital: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/52793065

There's just no way that the FZ200 can produce JPEGs of equivalent quality, no matter how much you tweak the engine.

 

[Donald B]

thanks for the comparisons, it shows why I think raw is a waste of time.

I can understand why you'd say that about the low ISO examples, because at typical LCD display sizes the difference is not obvious. However I don't think anyone could reasonably conclude the same about FZ200 ISO 1600 shots, like the one I linked to at the beginning of my post.

sherman_levine provided a quite striking real-world example of the same thing a couple of months ago when he posted some captures of a dance recital: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/52793065

There's just no way that the FZ200 can produce JPEGs of equivalent quality, no matter how much you tweak the engine.

the fact is that printed you are never going to see any difference even at a3, and even shermans shots will probably never get printed larger than 7x5in, even your shots the detail is smoothed over so the jpeg shots printed at a3 would look better.

these are all processed jpegs. in extremely difficult lighting.

cheers don





































--
Pentax K7, Panasonic fz150, Olympus XZ1, my main toys.

 

[cainn24]

the fact is that printed you are never going to see any difference even at a3, and even shermans shots will probably never get printed larger than 7x5in,

At 1600 ISO, at typical display sizes (that would be full screen on my LCD in my case), the difference between SOOC JPEGs and well-processed RAW is obvious to me.

even your shots the detail is smoothed over so the jpeg shots printed at a3 would look better.

Absolutely not:



Further, a cleaner image gives you more headroom to crop, which is critical on occasion.

The bottom line is that employing a RAW workflow for a few important images here and there is neither difficult nor particularly time consuming, so why campaign against it? No-one is saying that you have to shoot RAW, nor are they saying that your photography sucks if you don't.

 

[richj20]

Richard. In your first image do you think you might have been able to bring out more texture on the lake beach from RAW

Hello Eric,

Yes. I did so later, since I want to use that photograph as one of a series of 'early morning at the lake'. Here is another one:







As evidenced by the posts in this thread, there are varying opinions as to whether or not to shoot RAW, Jpeg, or RAW + Jpeg.

So as with most other facets of photography, people should experiment and decide what works best for them!

- Richard

--
"Careful photographers run their own tests." - Fred Picker

 

[One_Oldman_4U]

I shoot BOTH even if I hardly process RAW at the moment. At least when the time comes that I have time to play with editing, I have the RAW files already. Memory card are getting cheaper and so is external hard drives. I have at least 2 -32GB with me all the time and it's more than enough for a couple of days shooting and download it to my external hard drive (2TB) when I get home. A 32GB, you can shoot burst (RAW+JPEG) and some video and not really worry about running out of space.

 

[Baba Ganoush]

RAW & Jpeg. A great advantage of RAW is that when you edit in LR (or anything else), the editing is "non-destructive": i.e., the original RAW file is always there to be re-edited. With JPG, this isn't so.

Not true. Editing a JPEG in LR is also non-destructive. To demonstrate that, edit a JPEG file by reducing the exposure value to 0, say, so that the picture is very dark, then export the file from LR, selecting ORIGINAL from the Export pop-up menu. Now look at your exported file. You'll find it is the original version, not the (dark) edited copy. Go back into the LR Develop module, bring up the edited copy of the picture, press RESET, and voila! you have your original photo back again. If LR JPEG editing were destructive, you wouldn't be able to restore your original file by using RESET to undo any editing changes you had previously made to it, right?

Here is what Adobe says about the matter:

"With nondestructive editing, your original file is not altered, whether it’s a camera raw file or a rendered file such as a JPEG or TIFF. Your edits are stored in Lightroom as a set of instructions that are applied to your photo in memory. Nondestructive editing means you can explore and create different versions of your photo without degrading your original image data."

 

[One_Oldman_4U]

RAW & Jpeg. A great advantage of RAW is that when you edit in LR (or anything else), the editing is "non-destructive": i.e., the original RAW file is always there to be re-edited. With JPG, this isn't so.

Not true. Editing a JPEG in LR is also non-destructive. To demonstrate that, edit a JPEG file by reducing the exposure value to 0, say, so that the picture is very dark, then export the file from LR, selecting ORIGINAL from the Export pop-up menu. Now look at your exported file. You'll find it is the original version, not the (dark) edited copy. Go back into the LR Develop module, bring up the edited copy of the picture, press RESET, and voila! you have your original photo back again. If LR JPEG editing were destructive, you wouldn't be able to restore your original file by using RESET to undo any editing changes you had previously made to it, right?

Here is what Adobe says about the matter:

"With nondestructive editing, your original file is not altered, whether it’s a camera raw file or a rendered file such as a JPEG or TIFF. Your edits are stored in Lightroom as a set of instructions that are applied to your photo in memory. Nondestructive editing means you can explore and create different versions of your photo without degrading your original image data."

This is what I read from the retouching forum a while back:

Only if you save the new JPEG data as a new file after editing, then the original will not be affected. If you edit and edited JPEG file yes the data will degrade.

RAW is to be converted to TIFF etc then edit from there. The RAW file is never touched.