Challenge: Noticeable differences between RAW and a jpeg edited in 16 bit mode?

[Ilovemycam]

Just post pix. Pix is what we deal with, not words. Lets see jpeg vs raw.

 

[Helen B]

So shoot JPEG. What a good idea! Virtually everyone shoot JPEG some of the time.

Just don't pretend that there isn't any advantage to RAW, eh?

There is certainly not always an advantage in every instance.

...

In many other situations, it is more ambiguous than that, and in some, RAW is clearly superior, i admit.

That's why some people use raw and some use JPEG, I guess, and it isn't because they are lazy or ignorant.

 

[Gavjenks]

But if you try to tell people that there's no advantage to RAW

I didn't tell anybody that. Of course there are advantages.

I like your analogy with the food. It is a good one.

But very few chefs go out and slaughter their own chickens and grow their own wheat in the back yard, etc. There's obviously a balance that every chef chooses between maximum possible intervention and customization and convenience. Basically what I'm saying in this thread is:

1) That balance is probably closer to the pre-prepared side than is typically talked about on these forums. Many situations certainly are best with RAW, but probably not as many as people make out to be the case. Especially non pros who don't know everything their cameras can do and haven't considered all the angles (main intended audience of this thread)

2) Here are some tools you can use to shift that balance more toward the preprocessed and convenient side, without making as many sacrifices in final quality as you may have traditionally expected.


The exact balance point will be different for every person, but if you never considered this topic or these strategies before, you may well consider shifting yours from wherever it is to a relatively more preprocessed point (some greater % of borderline situations now shooting jpeg).

it isn't because they are lazy or ignorant.

Laziness is a possible pitfall of using RAW. Not a guaranteed one. I tried to make this very clear. The disadvantage is having to deal with the temptation, which takes some effort. Some less disciplined or more newbie photographers are likely to succumb to the temptation. Seasoned pros can probably handle it just fine and not.

 

[Ysarex]

Your intentions here, clearly, were to 1) reduce the contrast of the actual scene, and 2) up the saturation. Simple histogramming of your jpeg versus your intended shows a huge, two-peak-with-valley-in-the-middle mega contrasty pattern on the jpeg, versus a fairly even distribution in the intended.

The saturation is not a big deal, because upping saturation does not degrade data (there's already plenty of hue information in the jpeg. They're just boring hues, but the data is there, and thus doesn't have to be invented or stretched causing banding).

The contrast, however, IS a big deal. In order to follow my suggested process, you should have shot this with a custom picture mode of [0 -4 0 0] ([sharpness contrast saturation color tone]).

Did you do that? If not, then this is not a valid challenge photo, because I never claimed to be able to make whatever you want happen without any consideration of settings when taking it. In other words, you threw out the data that I needed and kept a bunch that I didn't need, when with the right settings, you could have done the opposite and made it possible to match.



Most people don't routinely do what I am suggesting (not necessarily because it's wrong. Possibly just because it requires more thinking in exchange for time, and because it is not the default setting). Thus, it is very unlikely that any existing photos are going to be valid challenge photos here. If you don't routinely use picture style and white balance in camera before a shoot to push the jpeg as far as possible in the right direction, then none of your old photos will work for demonstration purposes. You'd have to go take a new photo with optimal settings, and then post that as a challenge to match to the RAW processed version.

OK, got home and snapped a photo of my neighbor's Victorian house. Here's my version processed from the raw file:

Canon camera with the picture style set to faithful and the contrast set to -4 as you require.

Here's your JPEG: Victorian house

Waiting breathlessly.

Joe

 

[jake337]

So shoot JPEG. What a good idea! Virtually everyone shoot JPEG some of the time.

Just don't pretend that there isn't any advantage to RAW, eh?

My D90 hasn't produced a jpeg since.....Well I can't remember.

I produce my jpegs via post processing.




I guess we could send all that film we shoot to Walmart to get developed as well.......

 

[Benco]

Most people don't do that because there's no need to, if you shoot in raw then none of that matters. Let's approach it from a different angle: what's the advantage of shooting and editing in JPG over raw? I really don't see any, if you do that you have to go to way more trouble to achieve results that might nearly be as good.

I've outlined them multiple times:
1) RAW takes up 5x more memory on your card than jpeg does (16 bit is 2x + the light compression of OOC jpeg). Doubly problematic if you're on vacation and don't have a computer with you with proprietary software for converting RAWs (thus, can't clear out your card at the end of the day).

2) RAW dramatically reduces the number of photos you can take in a burst on low-mid range camera bodies (in mine, RAW alone will limit you to 1 FPS after just 7 shots, and RAW+jpeg will limit you to 1 FPS after just TWO shots. Jpeg allows 4 FPS continuously seemingly forever, by comparison)

3) RAW cannot be used OOC even if you dont want to edit it at all. Websites and printers can't read it, so you are obligated to process it through photoshop or whatever other RAW software. This is a disadvantage if you are taking normal photos of friends or something, for instance, and are not trying to win the pullitzer prize in photojournalism. Oftentimes while just out and about taking photos, I will have about a 30/70 mixture of funny snapshots that I want to share with somebody on facebook as a joke vs. real images I intend to be beautiful. With jpeg, I can pick out the silly ones and post without processing. With RAW, I'd have to painstakingly process them all first OR sit there and constantly switch back and forth between formats in camera, OR use up even more memory and cripple my ability to take burst shots with RAW + jpg.

4) For those images that you do want to process regardless, RAW takes much longer to load into photoshop than jpeg. At best this is annoying (if automated/uniform conversions) and I have to go eat a sandwich or something instead of editing photos like I want to, while it processes slowly. At worst, this wastes tons of my time, if I am actually attempting to do photo-by-photo optimized RAW conversions and am sitting at the keyboard the whole time.


The next two are more subjective musings than cold hard disadvantages, but:


5) In my opinion, the safety net of RAW encourages a photographer to be a little lazy and not worry about lighting or coloration in the field. Lighting, color, and exposure are all part of composition! And if you don't consider them carefully, then you won't even take the same photos that you would have if you did. i don't mean that you would have used different settings. I mean that if you don't consider these things, you will not even end up pointing your camera at the same scenes as if you do. And usually, what you do end up pointing at will be substandard composition. No amount of post processing can ever fix poorly conceived composition.

IF it were the case that RAW was the only way to achieve technical clarity and vividness in a print, then this would be a temptation that you'd just have to suck it up and learn to avoid. But IF you can actually achieve the same quality with jpeg (point of this thread is that I believe you can), then the ability to force yourself to not give in to that temptation to be lazy is a very nice feature. And if you're thinking about these things anyway as you shoot, then the picture style settings, etc. will be second nature side effects, and not a hassle at all.

6) Depending on how much you take editing of RAWs into your own hands, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. This varies depending on how you use them. If you edit RAWs in high quality, custom made RAW converters by major brand name software companies, then you're probably fine. But if you attempt to do basic things like noise reduction and sharpening yourself using sub-optimal software, you are almost guaranteed to end up doing worse than the professional Canon or Nikon engineers do in modern cameras, unless you spend half an hour fine tuning every little thing specifically to each image and have years of practice. In short: RAWs used naively by amateurs who don't use the right tools can lead to worse results than even a jpeg OOC.

Yes your first four points are some disadvantages of raw, none of them however make JPG an equal to raw for post processing. You digress.

 

[Ilovemycam]

Your intentions here, clearly, were to 1) reduce the contrast of the actual scene, and 2) up the saturation. Simple histogramming of your jpeg versus your intended shows a huge, two-peak-with-valley-in-the-middle mega contrasty pattern on the jpeg, versus a fairly even distribution in the intended.

The saturation is not a big deal, because upping saturation does not degrade data (there's already plenty of hue information in the jpeg. They're just boring hues, but the data is there, and thus doesn't have to be invented or stretched causing banding).

The contrast, however, IS a big deal. In order to follow my suggested process, you should have shot this with a custom picture mode of [0 -4 0 0] ([sharpness contrast saturation color tone]).

Did you do that? If not, then this is not a valid challenge photo, because I never claimed to be able to make whatever you want happen without any consideration of settings when taking it. In other words, you threw out the data that I needed and kept a bunch that I didn't need, when with the right settings, you could have done the opposite and made it possible to match.



Most people don't routinely do what I am suggesting (not necessarily because it's wrong. Possibly just because it requires more thinking in exchange for time, and because it is not the default setting). Thus, it is very unlikely that any existing photos are going to be valid challenge photos here. If you don't routinely use picture style and white balance in camera before a shoot to push the jpeg as far as possible in the right direction, then none of your old photos will work for demonstration purposes. You'd have to go take a new photo with optimal settings, and then post that as a challenge to match to the RAW processed version.

OK, got home and snapped a photo of my neighbor's Victorian house. Here's my version processed from the raw file:

Canon camera with the picture style set to faithful and the contrast set to -4 as you require.

Here's your JPEG: Victorian house

Waiting breathlessly.

Joe

Put them side by side. Best JPEG PP and Best RAW PP of the same image.

I know RAW will win with big prints. JPEG only has about 6% of the info a RAW file has. (6% image size anyway in mb)

Don't know about small prints and monitor with JPEG / RAW debate.

 

[TruckerDave]

Ok, no one cares. Shoot how you want. Others will do the same. Get over it.

Ding ding ding.

 

[480sparky]

I guess we need something to bicker about since the Nikon v. Canon thing has been beat to death.

Perhaps we should debate Chevy v. Ford.

 

[Gavjenks]

Okay here you go. Images wouldn't paste full size into the forum, so I made them both the same resolution as the raw one you gave me originally, and put them on imgur:
imgur: the simple image sharer

Click back and forth from image #1 and image #2 at the top of the screen.

Or look below (these are smaller for some reason than the imgur ones). My version from the jpeg on the left, raw version on the right.

 

[bratkinson]

I'll bet the audiophiles argued long and hard about the "advantages" of digital recording over analog. Analog wins, hands down. Still does. So do tubes.

Enter digital photography. In the pre-high pixel days, film won, hands down. Nowadays, digital wins both for color depth and pixel density, in my book. And for what it's worth, L-JPG and RAW-->LR4-->L-JPG look to be th same from my 5D3. But then, I'm an old geezer with glasses not looking for scientific and/or marketable results.

Maybe someday, someone will create a sensel that accurately differentiates every 0.0001 angstrum of light wavelengths and we'll have 10 to the 99th power of bit-level color depth.

 

[amolitor]

Okay here you go. Images wouldn't paste full size into the forum, so I made them both the same resolution as the raw one you gave me originally,

These two images look radically different. Was that your intention? What I take to be yours seems to lack shadow detail, and has quite ugly artifacting on the small awning on the extreme left of the frame. The colors seem less appealing, as well, but that might be simply that you like more saturation.

 

[Helen B]

Okay here you go. Images wouldn't paste full size into the forum, so I made them both the same resolution as the raw one you gave me originally, and put them on imgur:
imgur: the simple image sharer

Click back and forth from image #1 and image #2 at the top of the screen.

Or look below (these are smaller for some reason than the imgur ones). My version from the jpeg on the left, raw version on the right.

Both the shadow and highlight detail in the raw version are better, and it is not difficult to see the difference. The clouds in the JPEG version have featureless patches, and the shadows are blocked up. Many of the mid tones have that 'stretched too much look'.

Are you happy with the JPEG?

 

[Garbz]

Setting your picture style and white balance is something you would do only once for a given lighting situation (e.g. set it once when you start in mid day, then maybe reset at sunset, or if you switch to indoors, etc.), outside of extraordinary circumstances.

Yes except when a subject suddenly moves into the shade, or it so happens the next person you took a photo of is wearing a different coloured shirt. Man if you could suggest three different settings that would get me remotely in the ballpark every time then I and everyone here would be eternally grateful. But life doesn't work like that. Heck I'm sitting here at my desk and I see 4 different light sources with different colour balances on each and I don't even have daylight coming in from outside to mess things up. I think you're wasting valuable field time that you could be spending at home

Shooting jpeg, i was able to fire at full speed for something like 50 shots in a row before I gave up and assumed it was just infinite.

Shooting RAW only, my camera stopped after 7 shots and had to sit there and think for like 2 seconds. Then each subsequent photo was about 1 per second instead of 4, with thinking in between each time.

Not quite sure what the argument here is. If you routinely find yourself hitting the buffer limit then maybe you should have bought a better camera given the one you have is going to have a wreaked shutter quite early in its life. Action isn't continuous and those 7 bursts followed by gaps will in any normal scenario give you a break after a few shots to let your camera catch up. Even at the races where my goal was to capture as many racers as possible in an attempt to sell as many photos as possible you typically only fire three shots, recompose, fire three shots, recompose, etc.

The actual thing I am describing however, is. "Go do this thing that requires a bit of extra complexity, but not as much as dealing with RAWs, and let's see if it has any impact on image quality."

At WORST, this is equally as complex as dealing with RAWs. Even in optimal circumstances for your side of the argument, where somebody simply auto converts every single RAW to jpeg without touching their keyboard (using it only as a fallback safety net for catastrophic mistakes), it still equates to pushing a couple extra buttons vs. pushing a couple of other extra buttons.

Again I disagree. What you were describing is getting in the ballpark using camera settings and playing in camera menus in the field, often on a hard to see LCD screen (if shooting in the sun) and then doing some work in photoshop when you get home. How is this MORE difficult than just doing work in photoshop anyway. At BEST YOUR method is equally as simple as dealing with RAWs. And then you confirm it in your arguement saying it's pushing buttons vs pushing buttons. Yes, but you're not pushing buttons in the field viewing on an uncalibrated display, in uncontrollable light sources, when you should be taking photos.

My final thoughts on this are, if you're going to touch up the photos anyway why not get a program that treats RAWs and JPEGs identically? Honestly I open up Lightroom and if it weren't for the fact that some of the sliders don't work as well, and some options are missing I wouldn't know if I were working on a JPEG instead of a RAW.

 

[Helen B]

The colour space issue seems to have been pretty much ignored, even though it opened this thread. Getting correct single-point white balance at the time of shooting does nothing to enlarge the color space itself.