RAW is better..how?

[nanook s]

Certainly true for his particular business. Storage (not storage per se, but backup and archive; storage is meaningless if what's stored can not be reliably retrieved) is no real issue for 12 frames a day work demand. Either RAW or JPG would do fine.

 

[nanook s]

I'm not narrow-minded at all. I'm not the one advocating all pros should shoot RAW. I have consistently advanced the point that RAW is just another arrow i the quiver, to be used when appropriate. I use it on rare occasions to "push" the "film" for when available lighting is too dark to gain a shutter speed that I want. I'm simply saying that there's no need to worship RAW. For your line of work, frankly, both RAW bracketting and JPG bracketting would be fine.

40-50% growth seems to be quite common in boom times. My business have been growing at least at that pace every year for the last half decade, on revenue basis, not contract count, as we have been raising prices. Even quicker in the early 2000's. I do wonder though how the economic down turn will affect us all in the coming years. I remember the anemic years of the early to mid 90's.

 

[nanook s]

Since when is exposure analysis "ivory tower"? We are "pro" photographers, right? Not Uncle-Harry with a fancy camera and not knowing how to use it, right? Spot metering is avialable on lowly $1200 "advanced amature" cameras. How exactly would you use spot metering if you do not know the zones (or some analogous there of)? Isn't metering exercise on different parts of the scene photography 102 stuff? After that class, advanced students are supposed to gradually develop a sense of "seeing" scenes by how many stops they'd like to capture and use their tools accordingly . . . after getting familiar with what their tools can do in the exposure department, of course.

 

[nanook s]

Not true at all. A Polaroid is a 4"x5" contact print. A JPEG file contains far more display dynamic range than any chemical paper print can handle. A typical JPEG capture file also contains far more spatial data than a 4"x5" continuous-ink print.

If you want to draw film analogy. JPEG is the negative, which can be adjusted for a stop or two without major ill effect for 8x10 or smaller (exact size depending on film/sensor size). The ill effect for film is ugly grain; the digital equivalent is pixel clumping. For small prints (definition of "small" depends on original capture film or sensor size), grain and clumping get buried in the shriking to make the print.

What's the film equivalent of RAW processing frame by frame? Well, it's a little like developing one's own color film by hand. Some swear by it. Others buy color machines from Kodak and Fuji to do it. By the mid-1980's, machines were delivering such consistent results and chemicals were improving with each new generation that, developing one's own color film became the exclusive domain of students and hobbyists.

 

[John Motts]

One button press mass conversion? You get results that are poorer
than JPG's available straight out of the camera.

I presume you're referring to my post earlier.

Why are the results poorer than jpegs? You're obsessed!

If you do nothing to a RAW file you will get results the same as if they were jpegs. The camera still produces data to use for correcting the file, it just doesn't apply it to the actual image file. This obsession of yours that RAW is only for amateurs (you said that on another thread) or for those who don't know what they are doing, and your implication that it has no place in a professional's workflow is just bizarre.

 

[Steve Balcombe]

"Dynamic range" is a sensor characteristic, it has nothing to do with
whether the file ouput is 8bit or 12bit.

Yep, absolutely correct. However there is no guarantee that the entire dynamic range will be stored in the file.

What you are describing,
the difference is a "boundary issue" in slicing the same range.

No, wrong. The range which is 'sliced' into 2^8 values in the JPEG is not the same range as the full range of the RAW file. The 12 bit linear data in the RAW file is first gamma-corrected so it more closely corresponds with the way the human eye perceives brightness, then the extreme highlights and shadows are clipped (reducing the dynamic range) and the resulting data is saved as an 8-bit JPEG. The 8-bit JPEG is neither the middle 8 bits of a 12-bit file (as I have seen suggested on these forums many times), nor is it the the 12-bit RAW data simply resampled to 8 bits (which you seem to be saying, correct me if I am wrong).

But forget the theory and just use your eyes. RAW files contain more data than out-of-the-camera JPEGs, it is there for all to see. And it is not a question of getting exposure right - exposure affects both RAW and JPEG, it's just that the wider dynamic range of RAW gives more scope for recovery. Sometimes there is more detail in both highlights and shadows - proving, obviously, that exposure doesn't account for any of this.

 

[smuphoto]

Perhaps an audio analogy is in order? When CD's first came out, many audiophiles were horrified, believeing the sample rate of the digital process left out important musical information. That was true on paper, but many users could not hear the difference.

Now consider the next level of data loss with the MP3 medium. Sample rates really are quite low at the lower file sizes. Indeed, not only is concert hall ambience lost on some tunes, but parts of actual notes are clipped. But hey, you can get more songs on your player, and if you're listening with tiny ear buds while jogging down the sidewalk in traffic you probably won't notice anyways.

Likewise with RAW vs JPG, I suppose. An 8-bit JPG has tossed out bunches of data, but for many images the typical viewer cannot tell the difference. Indeed, for some images even a trained eye cannot tell the difference.

Is mediocrity the new excellence? For many, yes. For others it's a deliberate compromise, one that allows other benefits. For me, storage media are cheap, so I shoot RAW for all wedding and portrait work. I know for many images I could easily shoot only JPG. But sometimes it IS useful to be able to tweak EV and WB. For me, there is really no good reason to NOT collect and archive the purest form of the image --- I can always toss out data later!

Cheers,

Scott

 

[Rob-uk]

Raw is like film, film you processed yourself and printed yourself, Jpeg is like sending your film to costco, you get what they give you, which is generally okay but not what you always want.

Just processed 400 D2x NEF Raws in 20 mins on my quad core 3 ghz with 8 gb ram.

WOW!!!!!

Just opened 50 jpegs in 5 mins not so wow!

Raw has the upper hand apart from file size or buffer limits, but with the price of CF cards falling and buffers getting bigger, it seems pointless not shooting raw.

Rob

 

[nanook s]

I'm not opposed to shooting RAW occasionally. I'm opposed to the theory that pros are supposed to shoot all RAW at all time. I use RAW from time to time, for available light shutter speed, where I know the picture as captured would have to be way under-exposed for the necessary shutter speed, only for a few specific shots. When blowing highlight is the concern, using all-RAW is a poor crutch: one should think of:

1. expose better;
2. bracketting;
3. introduce sufficient light for proper flash/ambient balance.

Unlike at the shadow end where clumping could become an issue when data is being rescaled, the real gain at the highlight end from shooting raw if miniscule . . . and in order to get that, one has to shoot all RAW because over-exposure is by definition a mistake (unlike intentional under-exposure in order to gain shutter speed, where one can switch to RAW just for that shot, then switch back).

No one's perfect, but pefect each shot is not what the real world demands either. Do you shoot a 60 frames per second camera because no one's perfect at getting the perfect moment? The gain from raw is miniscule anyway, RAW does not preserve all 14-17 stops that the human eye can see. What it does is re-slicing the stops that the sensor is capable to capturing. For that, you have to make a number of trade-offs, especialy relating to data security if you have a busy studio.

As for arrogance and ignorance, please . . . you are projecting . . . perhaps you are too cheap to buy additional cards yourself, but at my end, I'm partially switch to a real "efilm" system, where the cards do not get recycled at all. Yes, a memory card gets used only once, then goes straight into archive . . . for ultimate data security.

Excluding all pros who only shoot raw, well, I'm not shooting exclusively in JPEG, some pros with far higher credentials than my own do. Judging artists by the tools that they use is, well, how shall I put it, arrogant and ignorant.

 

[Joe Pa]

What you fail to recognize is that "JPEG is a lossy compression technique used for full-color or gray-scale images, by exploiting the fact that the human eye will not notice small color changes." It assumes if two ajoining pixels are close to the same color, and brightness the eye won't notice if the colors are blended into 1 color. It is not debateable that data is discarded in a JPEG for the purpose of making the file smaller.

JPEG compression also introduces artifacts (8x8 blocks) into the image as a result of the compression which become more apparent when the same image is compressed multiple times or lower than the highest quality settings.

If you only output JPEG that means your image is has been compressed within the camera based on the quality setting in your camera. If you open it for minor curve corrections, rotation and cropping, and save it as JPEG, the remaining data is once again run through the compression process, resulting in more data loss even at the highest compression settings. Some labs will pre-process the images prior to printing which means another iteration of JPEG compression before it goes to print.

Do the test for yourself, take an image in RAW or TIFF, and then save it to JPEG, open the JPEG, rotate, and save the image in JPEG multiple times, then compare the results. Not only will you see JPEG artifacts you will see a significant reduction in color saturation. If you use less than the highest quality setting you will see these effects in even less save cycles.

Regardless of how "great" a photographer you are, capturing only JPEG is impacting your image quality, the nature of the algorithm guarantees it. Not to mention that you are trusting your camera to make all the decisions as to what data is discarded in the first place.

The best images originate in RAW, and processed in PSD or DNG format until the final client file is created in JPEG.