Which setting for PC pics?

C

coling

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Anyone know which quality settings on 450D (or in general) for photos that are stored and viewed on PC, rather than printing etc.

Surely the top settings are overkill for the above use, holiday snaps etc? The lowest setting is S(3.4m) up to RAW at 12m.
 
RAW is always the way forward, think of it this way.

The RAW file is the film negative and the small jpeg is the print.

The RAW file is important as there are lots of things you can do with it, jpegs are a finished product so there isnt a huge amount you can do with it.

There are many things on here about RAW v JPEG if you have a quick search!

Cheers,

Gary
 
For general holiday snaps and day to day photo's I use the highest jpeg. For me RAW is over the top. With the large jpeg it allows a bit of cropping and PP adjustment and then I batch resize them to upload or keep for viewing. I only use RAW for special one off shoots or if I'm worried about the lighting.
 
I always use the 'best' setting - you never know when you might want to print a pic and if you choose the low res option, you're buggered. Memory is cheap enough these days, at least that's my view.
 
Photodiva said:
I always use the 'best' setting - you never know when you might want to print a pic and if you choose the low res option, you're buggered. Memory is cheap enough these days, at least that's my view.
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Do you mean the best jpeg or RAW setting Carol?
 
If you're not interested in post processing, and you're genuinely not interested in looking at the pictures anywhere other than your PC monitor, the lowest quality jpeg setting on the camera would still look more than fine on screen. Afterall, you can resize a photograph to 640x480 pixels to view on the screen and it looks fine (assuming you're not cropping or zooming in too much).
 
Photodiva said:
I always use the 'best' setting - you never know when you might want to print a pic and if you choose the low res option, you're buggered. Memory is cheap enough these days, at least that's my view.
Click to expand...

:agree: this is true

Shine On said:
If you're not interested in post processing, and you're genuinely not interested in looking at the pictures anywhere other than your PC monitor, the lowest quality jpeg setting on the camera would still look more than fine on screen. Afterall, you can resize a photograph to 640x480 pixels to view on the screen and it looks fine (assuming you're not cropping or zooming in too much).
Click to expand...

when you're viewing the pictures on a calibrated monitor, then quality will make a difference, which is why I always shoot RAW for 99% of my images.
The only exception to this rule is when I'm shooting pictures for ebay, then the "fine" jpeg setting is used

:)
 
No matter what you believe your needs are now, one day you will regret throwing away an opportunity to create a great print from one of your pictures. At the moment, you think they're going no further than your PC. But what if you decide you'd like to enter one in a competition, or you want to join a course and need a print portfolio, or you photograph a child at a family gathering who's parent wants a print for the wall. There's no way you should make an arbitrary decision about throwing away that opportunity before it happens.

I've had friends approach me because they couldn't get a decent print from their camera and when I asked them why they'd turned the quality down, it was to get more pictures on a card. So they came home with 1.5 gb of free space on their card - and can't print their favourite picture, which they really wanted to do? I can't bring myself to feel sorry for them.

If you really don't want to learn how to process RAW the least you can do is capture the largest JPEGs possible.
 
It's the Facebook generation unfortunately. People just upload their photos on Facebook to share them instead of giving people the original files. People then download the files from facebook and get them printed, then wonder why the quality is appaling.

Unfortunately even though cameras are getting better a large proportion of society actually have worse prints than they could have got with a disposable film camera from Tesco...
 
I only shoot Raw now. Download them into a folder, and then RAW to JPG them all into another folder to "live with"
I am keeping the RAW files for one day when I have mastered lightroom. For now though, I have a user friendly jpeg, and save on camera card storage in only shooting RAW
 
There are many settings which I prefer to tweak after taking the photograph than before. These include....

- white balance;
- sharpening;
- noise reduction;
- levels/contrast;
- highlight recovery;
- cropping and straightening;
- and others.

If I shoot anything other than raw then these are choices I have to make and fiddle with prior to taking each shot, and it still doesn't give the control and flexibility I would like, or may need. Then there is the argument of perhaps wanting to print or display at large size. The best way to ensure you keep your options open is to shoot raw. If you shoot straight to JPEG then many of those decisions are "baked" into the file and cannot be undone. If you shoot to a smaller JPEG format then you could become even more unstuck.

Shooting raw is like pulling together the ingredients with which to bake a cake. You get to bake the cake at a later time. If you don't like the taste you can rebake it as often as you like, tweaking until you are happy with the result.

Shooting to JPEG is like having your cake baked in the camera. Once it's baked that's pretty much it. You can add sprinkles and icing if you like, but you are stuck with the cake underneath.

If you shoot to small JPEG then that's like baking a small cake. You can't make it any bigger afterwards. If you start with a big cake you can easily cut a bit off.
 
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