Raw/jpg

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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When news publications started to print images in color, some chose to have their photographers work with color negative film, but the majority asked their photographers to shoot with color slide materials. Most could edit slides much more quickly than color negatives when they had to take time to convert negatives to some sort of positive color proof. Unfortunately for the photographers, the slide delivered a relatively fixed image in terms of exposure and color balance; so, you bracketed exposure and prayed that the color of the scene looked well with the color balance of the film you were using - all problems that would not exist if you were shooting negative.

A parallel situation exists in today’s digital world. You can shoot jpgs and, like slide film, accept the limits to the adjustment and interpretation of the final image. Or, you can shoot raw and maximize your ability to adjust and interpret the final image. (Indeed, some news publications want their photographers to shoot jpg because they think, quite incorrectly, that makes the pictures more “honest” and protects them from photographers who would “falsify” their images. After all, who would trust a photographer who was actually there to understand what he was photographing as well as someone who was sitting in their office?)

Fortunately, all of us shooting digital can shoot raw plus jpg. But, we should understand the limits that jpgs place on us. I’m a big fan of the bythom.com site and many subsites when it comes to informed, intelligent discussions of photography. Here is Thom’s thoughts on raw and jpg. (Yes, I’m one of those folks that shoots raw or raw and jpg, but never just jpg.) More important, what are your thoughts?

https://bythom.com/newsviews/data-the-short-story.html
 
I shoot JPEG now. Don't care about the data loss. Just care about how the picture looks. Good photographs are more than resolution, detail and sharpness. And don't tell me that a photograph will look better with more resolution, detail and sharpness. I think Robert Frank settled that argument in the 1950s.
 
I'm definitely a RAW shooter. I want as much data recorded as possible and I trust my judgement when converting a RAW file to JPG much more than I trust a built in camera software judgement. I mean, the camera gives you the ability to record all this information, why wouldn't you take it.

The first digital camera I ever used, about twenty years ago, only produced JPG, in like 3MB size, and I quickly learned how limited your editing ability was before the Images started to have serious compression artifacts. A RAW file provides you with all the data. A JPG provides you with compressed data. In compressing the data, the camera software throws out LOTS of the pixel information you could use in post processing.

It's like, back in the film days, shooting Polaroid compared to shooting negative film. With the Polaroid, the camera makes all the processing and printing decisions for you, and once it is done, there is nothing you can do to go back and adjust anything. Whereas with a negative, you can adjust your processing of the negative, adjust your printing of the negative, and adjust your processing of the print.

I've always been a control freak, and want as much control of my images as possible. So I always shoot RAW.

Best,
-Tim
 
Thanks for the link, will check it out.

A short answer Its not fair 4 a long post but I think the difference is so small that I hardly can see it
 
Dogman said:
I shoot JPEG now. Don't care about the data loss. Just care about how the picture looks. Good photographs are more than resolution, detail and sharpness. And don't tell me that a photograph will look better with more resolution, detail and sharpness. I think Robert Frank settled that argument in the 1950s.
Click to expand...

Well said! Back when I shot digital, it was monochrome JPEG only. Since I spent so many years shooting color transparency film, the "limitations" of JPEG didn't feel like limitations at all, just the given set of parameters within which I worked. Photoshop Elements provided all the controls I needed for overall brightness, contrast, and cropping, far more than what's available to a transparency shooter. With the camera's live view and auto bracketing, I pretty much nailed what I wanted, most of the time. Yes, I'm lazy, I suppose, but I got the results I wanted.
 
When I worked for the AP in both the DC and Baltimore bureaus, it was all colour neg (as they had a C41 machine on premises, at least at the DC bureau they did). Same with McClatchy and Gannett and even AP Worldwide. When I shot for lifestyle magazines it was all slide and transparency, with I think the possible exception being Maclean’s Magazine in Canada, which is a news magazine, and I seem to recall that it too was colour neg (memory is a bit foggy on that one!).

I couldn’t imagine strictly shooting JPEG for a client, and I really wouldn’t want to shoot that exclusively for my personal work either. Maximum data is maximum data, and I’d rather not throw it away at the press of the shutter button. Of course, with extra megabytes comes extra computing and extra storage, which are unfortunate byproducts.

Having said that, I can see the value of shooting JPEGS only if I was shooting a job which required on-site image transmittal, like a news event.
 
I usually shoot both. I have recently started using an old 5d classic with the 40mm ultron when I want to play with color and it made me wonder if some of the “magic” people talk about with that particular camera are in fact just the limitations imposed by it. It doesn’t have the range of modern sensors, so the image sort of needs to be “set” upon taking. Very little latitude before it falls apart. Similar in some sense to jpg. Obviously the RAW still is quite different from jpg, but that idea of “creativity through limitation” is there and keeps people out of trouble. Being able to lift shadows out of darkness often results in a perfectly exposed, yet flat and boring image. Painters do a similar thing of limitation. Use a limited palette to create color harmony.
 
I always shoot raw, very occasionally raw+jpeg when I have to deliver a lot of images in a hurry for a website. Raw files, with their ability to be flexible with regard to color balance, are one of the best aspects of digital photography in my opinion.
 
Mr. Pierce again throws cat amongst the pigeons.

If one wants to shoot nothing but jpegs, it’s your money, it’s your camera, and it’s your time, and it’s your personal decision, based on reasoning that no one else is really privy to so it’s a decision others ought to respect.

But.

It’s fair to note that others might want much more out of their photography than what jpegs can ever consistently provide. Ultimately, as Thom halfway alludes to , that’s just math.
The sheer amount of color and tonal information in a scene, which the most modern sensors are capable of capturing, and the most modern and adept post-processing algorithms are capable of interpreting and rendering in a huge variety of ways, has moved photographic artistry in a new direction, away from solely visualizing a scene, framing and depressing the shutter release.
When the camera’s processing algorithm spits out a jpeg, it is telling the photographer, “This is my mechanical interpretation of what I think you saw, or wanted to say. Like it or leave it. If you wanted your photograph to say something else to people, sorry, better luck next time.”

The dynamic range, bit depth, color depth of early sensors was so limited, that there was very little room to push those RAW files in the direction you needed them to go, to create the artistic impression you wanted to create. Because of that, the jpegs, being the best that the camera could do with the data, was pretty close to what you were ever going to be able to do with the data, so jpegs were a reasonable choice for most people, less work, smaller file sizes (back when storage was expensive, computers were slow, and smaller files mattered), and more or less looked just as good.

That was then, this is now. Things have changed dramatically since then, both in sensor capability and the ability of post processing programs to help photographers create the vision they imagined when they depressed the shutter, knowing how they’d be able to interpret the file later, instead of being stuck with what the camera’s interpretation was.
If you’ve got current generation sensors and current generation post processing software at your disposal, and you are shooting nothing but jpegs, you have saved yourself a lot of computer time. You have also left 80% of what shutter press could have been lying on the ground, unexplored, as walked away from it. 80% of what that photograph could have been. Uses of color, uses of tonal gradation at various parts of the image, changes in the lighting, all called into service by the photographer, after the fact, to create the image he wanted to create, or, even better, to create an even better image that he wasn’t even considering the instant he pressed the shutter. . It’s a long list.
Framing, and composition are just as important as they ever were, and jpegs will render both of those, but the possibilities for a photographer to be creative and realize some vision he might have, are much greater now than they have ever been, because the creative needle has moved towards post processing. It’s not a move away from composition, it’s an addition, but it’s an addition one can only take advantage of if shooting RAW, and then working intelligently with those files to push them in the direction that matches the photographer’s vision, instead of the camera’s vision.
 
In addition to old days slides, here is still somewhat alive Instax. No editing after image is taken.

If you and camera are capable here is zero need in raw, except some secret technologies in printing.
Toronto Star known photog takes it in JPEG1 and sends from the scene to the office.

I had 5D with 50L and IQ was so good SOOC, I switched it to JPEG1 only.

Modern lenses are often so dirt cheap some have not exposed corners and huge distortions.
It is corrected by chopping corners and fixing distortions in camera via JPEG1.
If you open RAW you'll see it all, to correct it you have to depend on Adobe, which is not in the rush to make new lenses profiles or you have to use trashy software from camera makers.

I switched M-E 220 to compressed DNG after it got last version of non flaky sensor. Files are so small. And auto WB from this sensor is too cold.

But if camera has no sRAW selection, only max pixs size and it is after 20MP, forget it. Waste of disk space.
If you write off disks as business expense it is one thing. But any SSD after one TB is nowhere near to this "storage is cheap" nonsense.
 
I like to use RAW. My taste in post processing has changed over the years and thankfully I can just start over with the original RAW and get the look I want now and in the future (when I inevitably change my mind again). I'm interested in making art though. If I was doing the family snapshot thing or I was a working pro, I might think differently. Also, RAW processing software gets better and better over the years too. I just want the most flexility. There's no one right way to do things.
 
It's so amusing. I used to always shoot Raw and preached the gospel to other photographers. But I looked at the kind of photos I do and the basic simplicity of them. I don't shoot color. Okay...I almost never shoot color. The percentage of color I do shoot is less than 1% in a year's average. I don't shoot anything in very low light levels. Okay...almost never again.

I don't make a living with my cameras. I don't work for anyone else. I don't have to shoot night time football at rural high school stadiums lit by 60 watt bulbs, half of which are burned out. Don't laugh. I've had to do that. With Tri-X pushed beyond the limits of anything Kodak ever intended. And then drive 40 miles to meet an early deadline for regional editions while editors tapped their feet waiting for those great sports shots.

I don't make large prints. A 13x19 is maximum. I print a lot but they're relatively small prints. Photos are posted online, usually at something like 72 dpi and never look great no matter if you shoot Raw with 100mp. I give away photos that people like enough to hang on their walls. I don't fuss over shadow detail or an occasional burned out highlight. I still use Lightroom to tweak, fiddle, fuss and polish my JPEG files to look their best. You can do that, you know--process JPEGs and improve their looks. I don't want large files. I have Nikon's with 36mp sensors but I usually shoot them as "fine/medium" JPEG. Plenty good enough for prints to look like medium format if you know what you're doing.

My subject matter is the mundane minutiae of daily living which I find interesting. Stuff like this:



_LS20008-1-2-1-1.jpg



And this:



XS1_0009-1-1-3.jpg


And interesting light, like this:


_LS20010-1-2.jpg



Now, why on earth should I shoot in Raw when I can get really good quality photos that do everything I want them to do using a more simple procedure?
 
I migrated from 20 years of film photography to digital back in 2003. From then on, I've almost exclusively used jpeg only. Doing so seems most nearly equivalent to using film. Jpegs offer me just about the same latitude of manipulation as I was able to get in a darkroom. I understand that modern RAW files offer more room for post-exposure manipulation, but I rarely want more than I was able to get with film.
 
The results are what matter to me. I always shoot RAW. But there have been times I've shot RAW+JPEG on my Fuji cameras and chosen the JPEG as the rendition I liked over what I could do with the RAW file. I did edit some of these JPEGs in Apple Photos or Capture One, but the baseline JPEG was a better starting point and the noise and contrast from bringing up the blacks gave the gritty look I was going for. The 60mm ƒ/2.4 macro is a PITA to use on the X-Pro1, but the rendition in both color and black and white is divine. The 14mm ƒ/2.8 has a different visual signature but it also worked well with the in-camera monochrome JPEGs. I now use the X-Pro3 and haven't explored JPEG options very much. I took some samples in the first few days after I received it and made some in-camera JPEG conversions and was not super impressed, at least with the 23 and 35mm lenses I have. I just have been shooting RAW. From the X-Trans III generation on, Capture One has had Fuji color profiles you can apply to the RAW files. I don't know how close they are to the JPEGs. While I thought I would enjoy using some of these, I was surprised to find I hate all of the color profiles. For my black and white pictures, I have been using either the Acros + Red or the Film Curve Standard profiles and for the latter making a black and white conversion with color sliders like I did with my X-Pro1 files.
 
When will we get to a point where this isn't a conversation anymore? It seems so pointless to shoot JPEG only when every camera has RAW conversion. It's just too easy to shoot and develop a JPEG with some control over levels, colors, contrast... etc.
 
Early in my digital experience I was advised, by a person whose opinion I respected, to save my RAW files, even though at the time I didn't know what a RAW file actually was and I didn't have any software to process them. To this day I've continued to save both RAW and JPEG files. I still haven't got any real software to process the RAW files. I've found it to be a good way to learn how to use my camera by attempting to get the JPEG output SOOC to be what I'd like the images to be. Yes my storage has suffered because of this habit. Maybe someday I'll either have the time/software and the desire to work on the RAW files. Until then, I'll continue to save both types of files.
 
100% RAW capture with DSLR. Canon. Process with Photoshop, still using CS-4, iMac. View various ways.

But then there is my iPhone. It’s my go to camera now.
 
If you want a given photo to look a certain way, and that 'certain way' is what the JPEG engine creates, there's no need to bother with raw. I have a friend that cannot stand spending any significant amount of time at the computer to adjust raw files. He accepts what the JPEG engine of his Sony camera gives him. I used to do something similar...with Kodachrome.
 
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