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To Raw or not to Raw
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- Richard King
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All images from digital camera's start of RAW. the choice is... do you want your camera to process it (and produce a JPEG for you) or do you want to process it yourself.
If I apply the "auto" preset in lightroom to batch RAW import, you can bet your bottom dollar that, sometimes lightroom borks the image. however, what's great is that I can sort the image immediatally, without damaging it
If I chose to let the camera do the processing, for me, then it probably spews out the same as the lightroom "auto" feature, at which point, the creative shot that has a really tricky whitebalance / exposure / totally is spoilt forever
Of course this depends on workflow. If I am shooting an event, and I can keep everything between tight predefined lines by carefully controlling lighting and the like, and if I can make the camera settings get it right 100% of the time, I save a lot of PP time by shooting JPEG
If I apply the "auto" preset in lightroom to batch RAW import, you can bet your bottom dollar that, sometimes lightroom borks the image. however, what's great is that I can sort the image immediatally, without damaging it
If I chose to let the camera do the processing, for me, then it probably spews out the same as the lightroom "auto" feature, at which point, the creative shot that has a really tricky whitebalance / exposure / totally is spoilt forever
Of course this depends on workflow. If I am shooting an event, and I can keep everything between tight predefined lines by carefully controlling lighting and the like, and if I can make the camera settings get it right 100% of the time, I save a lot of PP time by shooting JPEG
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It's now clear that not only do you not have a clue what you're talking about, but you consider yourself superior in your ignorance.
It's odd that you don't want to impress anyone -yet you post pictures on the sharing section 'not asking for critique' and according to your welcome post you are 'not claiming to be an expert in any way.' but despite the hundreds of years of experience of RAW shooters above, you still assert that 'shooting Raw is a waste of time and space'.
It'd be interesting to see how much effort you'll put in when we get onto a subject you care about and know something about
For the record:
Shooting for money, owning an iPad or wanting critique to help yourself improve are not signs of a personality disorder, any more than owning a Nikon is.
And nor do any of the above stop us loving taking photo's, or make our picture taking in some way invalid.
And we don't care whether you shoot Raw, we only care that you offered an unqualified opinion to someone who wanted to know whether they should shoot Raw.
I'm sorry if I have upset you with my ignorance, its true I did post an image in the wrong place when I joined by way of introduction as you found when you researched my previous posts.
I'm not trying to give you or the OP any advice, they asked if Raw was worth bothering about, I said I don't think so.
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You said a bit more than "I don't think so" you backed up your opinion with lots of incorrect reasons/misunderstanding. Others have corrected them to assist the OP which is a good thing.
I think you can be assured that nobody here cares if you use Raw or JPEG or are trying to convert you to the church of Raw
Not without colour shifts and not nearly to the same degree (having only 8 bit of information) and WB already applied.
There is a lot of misconception here simply because people do not really understand what WB really is and what happens during conversion.
WB is basically a per channel exposure correction for 4 raw channels (R, G1, G2 and B). So at the lowest level WB is a set of 4 multipliers (one for each channel) stating what to do with the exposure. In most of the raw converters it is hidden and presented to user as colour temperature and tint which is not good enough for precise control (I mean if you can simply control each channel then it would be inherently simpler - add red or reduce blue etc). The only converter that I know of which exposes WB like what it truly is to the user is RPP (implemented by a photographer for a photographers use).
Now consider the fact that the camera sensors in majority of the cases are tungsten balanced (meaning that they will give roughly equivalent response under tungsten lighting which will mean WB multipliers will be not that different for each channel) - what will WB application do?
Shooting in daylight for example green channel will have more response then the two others - sometimes even in a region of 2 stops. If you base your exposure on the green one not clipping then blue and red will end up underexposed. Now setting WB to certain value in these conditions and maintaining the exposure you may end up actually pushing your green channel out and loose highlight details. In JPEG since WB is already applied those changes are not recoverable - you green channel highlights will be lost forever.
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I think rankbadyin gets our point now folks, lets be nice
In summary: if you want more flexibility in post production, shoot RAW
In summary: if you want more flexibility in post production, shoot RAW
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- For most modern dSLRs it is simplicity itself to create a jpeg from a raw file that is identical to the jpeg the camera would have produced.
- Unless all of the in-camera settings were perfectly optimised then is is always possible to produce a jpeg from a raw file that is superior to the jpeg the camera would have produced, although the difference will be minimal if the in-camera settings were close to optimal.
So there's little advantage to shooting raw if you can be certain of getting every setting exactly correct for every shot. When I am good enough to guarantee that, then I'll switch to shooting jpeg only. And the first shot I take will be of the squadrons of piggies flying past my window.
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Really?
I shot jpeg + raw for this image. Here's the jpeg. As you can see the exposure and white balance are totally wrong.
And here's what I managed to get from the raw file. Let's see you process the jpeg and get something close.
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Really?
I shot jpeg + raw for this image. Here's the jpeg. As you can see the exposure and white balance are totally wrong.
And here's what I managed to get from the raw file. Let's see you process the jpeg and get something close.
I'm not sure how your camera managed to produce something so wrong, but what I said was if the image is good I keep it, if not it goes in the bin, I don't spend time twiddling, neither mine or yours, that would just go in the bin.
Ok lets hang on to that for a moment - lets assume you have a correctly exposed JPEG and RAW that accompany it of a high DR scene that you managed to bring down by the use of various filters (contrast reducing, ND grads etc). In the above case the scene DR will be compressed and therefore may be flat which needs a contrast boosting in postprocessing. Having JPEG with 256 levels per channel you will be quite limited in your contrast adjustment before you hit posterisation or noise (since contrast is compressing of the levels you will end up with less levels per channel and more gradations instead of smooth tonal transitions). RAW files in most nowaday cameras have from 4096 to 16384 levels per channel (12 or 14 bits) which makes this particular adjustment free from a compromise on quality.
This is just one example and usually in PP and various shooting conditions there are many others. RAW unlike many people thinking is not just there to recover from one's mistakes. It is there so you can work with a better quality of data to start with.
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What if you are intending to capture a one off shot(s). Lets say a family event under different lighting, indoor, outdoor, flash. Or lets say you have trekked 10mile after a 200mile drive to capture a sunrise from a remote location.
Will you still suggest a jpg fire'n'forget policy or maybe at least raw+jpg. Why go to the effort of capturing a possible one off shot with possibly thousands of pounds of worth gear only with the result being "nah, bin it!"
Will you still suggest a jpg fire'n'forget policy or maybe at least raw+jpg. Why go to the effort of capturing a possible one off shot with possibly thousands of pounds of worth gear only with the result being "nah, bin it!"
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And my final contribution to this futile argument: As far as I'm aware, just about every pro will use RAW when circumstance allow or indicate its use. We shoot for money. It's how we pay for mortgages and holidays.
Do you really think we would use RAW for fun? Or because we think it makes us look cool? Or do you think it's because we can produce better photographs and make more money that way?
Do you really think we would use RAW for fun? Or because we think it makes us look cool? Or do you think it's because we can produce better photographs and make more money that way?
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Just to take Jon's comment one stage further...
The whole point of learning about RAW is that it gives you the option of making an informed choice as to whether it suits a given situation or not.
I shoot either RAW or Jpeg depending on the dictates of a shoot and the factors which influence it; ie light, DR, file sizes, filing time constraints, No of images required, location etc etc etc.
Neither is always right, but occasionally one could well be disastrously wrong.
The is no such thing as the purism of a photograph 'SOOC'. Every image is developed, either by you or by the camera, just as every film neg or wet plate had to be developed. Taking a short amount of time to process your images should be a matter of pride, in the same way that getting a film spool developed properly was/is.
By all means pick which ever file format you prefer - but for heavens sake don't make that choice through pure ignorance and laziness!
I don’t think the example images posted above are very good examples of the benefits of raw to be honest and if I were the OP I wouldn’t see any of the examples as a compelling reason to switch away from JPEG. In all of the above cases it isn’t any fault of the JPEG format that the images are poor, it was user error plain and simple. You can easily ‘fool’ a camera into taking a bad JPEG by not preparing for the shot correctly.
In the underwater example the wrong WB was set on the camera, the picture would look the same if the wrong WB was set in Lightroom for the raw as well, and it would be just as apparent that it was wrong on the camera LCD at the time it was taken as it would on a computer screen in PP.
The ‘net is littered with raw vs. JPEG discussions where contrived examples are used to show how much better raw is for recovery, the reality is most of them should have been deleted at the time they were taken. Who takes a shot where the histogram is bunched up to the left and thinks it’s OK I’ll bump up the exposure slider 3 stops later (discounting shots of black cats at night of course)? Who sees a screen full of blinkies and thinks that’s just peachy the highlights and whites slider will sort that out :bonk:
Back to the original question; I’ve switched to raw only from raw + JPEG once I started using Lightroom, it was a game changer for me and meant that I could use raw just as easily as JPEG so other than perhaps the size of the files there are absolutely no reasons not to use raw (for me). I have a couple of import presets that add a few tweaks to contrast / saturation / curves / sharpening etc. and that is all that most images get, so in reality the PP time is zero for those.
Some shots need a bit more work, back lit shots for example where the scene has a large dynamic range, and I can do a little bit more with those because of the ‘overhead’ in the raw file in terms of bit depth before the highlights and shadows posterise. Or rapidly changing lighting where getting exposure and WB nailed for every shot is difficult; raw gives more room for correction.
So, if you take a significant number of shots where some correction is necessary; or if you want that little bit of a safety net that raw gives you in terms of exposure and WB correction; then you can get better results by shooting in raw and converting to JPEG later for sharing / printing.
That said, my monitor can’t display the extra information that the raw contains and my printer can’t print it and even if they could my eyes wouldn’t detect the differences, and friends and family on Facebook wouldn't really notice the differences. So I would say if you get a good exposure on the majority of your shots, can take some time setting up your camera correctly, and the images will be printed, emailed or put on the ‘net with minimal PP; and it isn’t the end of the world if you mess up a shot or two then JPEG might do everything that you need.
In the underwater example the wrong WB was set on the camera, the picture would look the same if the wrong WB was set in Lightroom for the raw as well, and it would be just as apparent that it was wrong on the camera LCD at the time it was taken as it would on a computer screen in PP.
The ‘net is littered with raw vs. JPEG discussions where contrived examples are used to show how much better raw is for recovery, the reality is most of them should have been deleted at the time they were taken. Who takes a shot where the histogram is bunched up to the left and thinks it’s OK I’ll bump up the exposure slider 3 stops later (discounting shots of black cats at night of course
)? Who sees a screen full of blinkies and thinks that’s just peachy the highlights and whites slider will sort that out :bonk:Back to the original question; I’ve switched to raw only from raw + JPEG once I started using Lightroom, it was a game changer for me and meant that I could use raw just as easily as JPEG so other than perhaps the size of the files there are absolutely no reasons not to use raw (for me). I have a couple of import presets that add a few tweaks to contrast / saturation / curves / sharpening etc. and that is all that most images get, so in reality the PP time is zero for those.
Some shots need a bit more work, back lit shots for example where the scene has a large dynamic range, and I can do a little bit more with those because of the ‘overhead’ in the raw file in terms of bit depth before the highlights and shadows posterise. Or rapidly changing lighting where getting exposure and WB nailed for every shot is difficult; raw gives more room for correction.
So, if you take a significant number of shots where some correction is necessary; or if you want that little bit of a safety net that raw gives you in terms of exposure and WB correction; then you can get better results by shooting in raw and converting to JPEG later for sharing / printing.
That said, my monitor can’t display the extra information that the raw contains and my printer can’t print it and even if they could my eyes wouldn’t detect the differences, and friends and family on Facebook wouldn't really notice the differences. So I would say if you get a good exposure on the majority of your shots, can take some time setting up your camera correctly, and the images will be printed, emailed or put on the ‘net with minimal PP; and it isn’t the end of the world if you mess up a shot or two then JPEG might do everything that you need.
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I would agree with you Mark, but I'm not commenting further on this thread.
So I can't.
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Actually it isn't. It's a technique called ETTR employed by quite a few Canon users for extracting the maximum dynamic range in an image without resorting to HDR. Or at least Frank's examples are.
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Because I told it to. I'd got fed up with people saying that "you can do everything in Jpeg that you can do in Raw". Even if you used logic (dynamic range, bit depth, etc.) some people insist on believing an obvious falsehood. So this image was produced specifically, and solely, to prove that belief wrong. And so far nobody has got anywhere close.
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neil_g said:
I'd shoot sports in RAW if I had enough memory but the times I've shot boxing on RAW I went through 4gb in about 5minutes so I was forced to shoot jpg.
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Nah, not at all, but the way that Canon sensors deal with the light tends to lend itself more to the technique than Nikons from what I can see. There seems to be about a standard +/- 2/3rds difference between the two companies in exposure terms.
I know what ETTR is thanks, but then the statement accompanying the photo; “Here's the jpeg. As you can see the exposure and white balance are totally wrong” is misleading, the JPEG is displaying exactly what you would expect because you have instructed the camera to bias the exposure towards the right, it’s apples and oranges.
Has it possibly occured to you that camera may be setup to auto WB and didn't get it right? In general stating that WB should always be got right on a scene is not applicable to all possible shooting scenarios so I don't really accept it as a valid argument. And in some cases (like getting the skintones right in challenging lighting) it cannot even be done on location reliably (gray card would not always help in those situations as well as auto wb) and you will have to rely solely on PP.
ETTR is not such a good thing when you care about colour fidelity. Using ETTR basically one will end up with colour shifts as opposed to get the exposure right.
This article will show how to check it for yourself using ColorChecker and this one will shed some light to one of the reasons as to why this is happening (basically because of the highlights tonal compression by raw tonal curve in modern cameras).
The articles are Google translated from russian site so I apologise for the quality of translation.
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Yes, I’m sure that could be partially the reason – but yet again I do not think the images shown are the least bit useful in answering the OP’s question. The JPEG looks like it does because of choices made by the photographer, not limitations of the file format.
Has it possibly occurred to you to read my original post? Where I stated;
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I didn't buy a Camera to make money, or dance to someone elses tune, I bought it for pleasure only.
For saying I think Raw is a waste of time and money, I get called Ignorant and Lazy by those who think they are better than me.
Why should I strive to be better than anyone, my half empty cup has the same amount in it as those trying to have half full cups.
I joined the Whiterigg Philharmonic Orchestra which was set up for those who love Music but can't play anything, they don't tell you what you are playing till the night its on, and if you get caught practising, you get flung out.
I'm thinking of setting up a Camera Club for Mediocre Photographers who don't care what the WB button does, who paint their own Red Ring round the Lens, who think a Histrogram is a Letter from the past. The rules are simple, anyone caught trying to sell an image to iStock for 20p will be thrown out instantly. If Bresson can make an international reputation with a blurry picture of a man jumping a puddle, there must be hope for us all.
The images here were to illustrate the case - of course some of them were done deliberately. And of course they are to demonstrate the limitation of the format.
Yes I did read it - I was replying to this in case it was not entirely clear and not limiting the situation just to the case where there is no time to set WB:
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So did quite a few people in this forum myself included. The problem is (imho of course) not in what you use it for, but in this "Ken Rockwell"'ian attitude - 'I don't use it so there must be no reason to use it at all'. I believe you were given tons of reasons on this thread - it is up to you where you go from here.
And to lighten up the mood perhaps - a little story from my old days in university. From my philosophy course I would recall an old story from the argument between idealists and materialists in the beginning of 20th century. Materialists argued with idealistic idea "I cannot see therefore it does not exist" by asking idealist to:
a) stand in front of the wall
b) close eyes
c) walk through the wall in a proof of their statement
Similarly in this case not seeing the issue does not mean it is not there (and it is applicable in general to all the statements about not seeing the difference in 8bit vs 12/14/16 bit, in JPEG vs raw/tiff files etc).
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I have cameras to make money with and for pleasure, If a clinet is paying me, I have a duty to give them the very best possible within the framework of the job. Usually that means shooting raw, and doing detailed RAW conversions. For pleasure, I do "whatever" unless the shot is "really important to me" then i definitely shot it in RAW
Nope, if you choose not to use RAW, you simply are handing over some creative choices to your camera, which more often than not will do a decent enough job. However, If you choose to shoot RAW, you then have the opportunity to take control over those choices in a very fine way.
nope your cup (half empty or full) has less in it than those that decide to go the extra mile and explore what the rest of the cup can be filled with
that's your choice, there is probably some mileage in it. However, one day, you will see a shot that blows you away, and you might just wonder how and why it was pulled off, but because you decline to explore the edges, you will never ever be able to shoot like that, because the glass half full middle of the road attitude doesnt stretch you or inspire you to learn and progress
Im photography nuts. I created room sized images using turf on a frame on the wall (camera obscura), experimented with 110 year old lenses on a modern DSLR, cross processed my own film, made holograms, made my own glass plates, whipped the IR filter of a old DSLR, ground my own lenses, made my own filters, bellows, lighting etc. etc.. 90% of the experimental stuff was crap, but boy did I learn a lot from the 10% , and also the 90 % of total rejects
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