How to Tell Whether Raw Photos are Keepers?

[480sparky]

Ok thanks for the clarification. So if you shoot Raw or Jpeg plus Raw, you get a jpeg thumbnail in the raw files. But in neither raw case do you get a full jpeg within the raw file. You only get a full jpeg in the jpeg file.

Correct.

 

[480sparky]

Just for giggles, I opened a Nikon NEF file in my word app.

Here's what it looked like (personal data has been redacted):

Over 20,000 pages (the file was still adding pages once it got to that number... I just closed it) of overwhelmingly cryptic text. I searched for JPG and found 4 results, all looking like:

 

[Ysarex]

Ok thanks for the clarification. So if you shoot Raw or Jpeg plus Raw, you get a jpeg thumbnail in the raw files. But in neither raw case do you get a full jpeg within the raw file. You only get a full jpeg in the jpeg file.

It's actually manufacturer variable. My Canon G7xmkii embeds a full size JPEG in the raw file. My Fujis embed a downsized JPEG.

 

[21limited]

If you don’t get an image you like right off the camera, raw is the format that will give you the best option of correcting it. Learning to see what you have in a raw images, is part of the learning process.

The raw for this image was unimpressive.
2024-07-18-Penn-Lake_sunset by Norm Head, on Flickr

In this image, the light was very blue, and the rediish-purple highlights in the clouds were overpowerd. The colour depth of the raw gave me the ability to produce a seamless looking colour adjustments without banding or other artifacts.

It’s value was I could see from having worked on thousands of raw files, what had been captured.
It’s not about what the raw looks like, it’s about what you can make of it.

Shooting jpeg, it’s better to alter your filters in advance and get it to a look as close as possible to what you want straight off the camera. ( To do that you would actually do more work than capturing RAW and working in post. You’d have try all relevant filters and pick the one you thought was to your likeing.) Alterations desired after capture, (in jpg) may not be possible. Many photos don’t require raw. But anything you plan to spend time enhancing should be raw. Beleive it or not, compared to say 16 bit TIFFs, which is as close as you can get to maintaining your raw informtion after edits, DNGs are also very efficeint in their use of space.

IN photographs like this one, where the colour has been bumped in the red channel and supressed in the other chanels to mke the Tug Boat stand out, using Apple photos, you can save your DNG with an XMP file that will record your changes and re-apply the when loaded on to desktop their Photos program, so, you get the advantage of no lost detail and a file size 1/4 that to a 16 bit tiff.m (Use apple software and it allows me to save my edits if I wish to transfer into an archive flie using dng) Other software may vary. I have no iea how that XMP file would be interpretted by non-Apple software.)

2024-05-14-Leamington-construction-2 by Norm Head, on Flickr

I would not recommend you try colour manipulation on a jpeg file. Too much information has been thrown away to enable the smaller file size. However, once you are done working on it, and you are sure you will never want to edit it differently (which is a silly thing to think, I do some reprocessing every time I repost or print, a practice followed by many photographers including famous ones liek Ansel Adamas) saving as good quality jpg will give you an exact reproduction, you just can’t work on it as dramatically. Raw is probably 12 or 14 bit colour depth, jpg is 8. You throw away 4-6 bits of colour information and detail, when you use jpeg. Sometimes you need it. (But not necessarily all the time.)

It’s not really aboout the labels jpeg and raw, it’s about bit depth.

8, 12, 14 vs 16-Bit Depth: What Do You Really Need?!

“Bit depth” is one of those terms we’ve all run into, but very few photographers truly understand. Photoshop offers 8, 16, and 32-bit file formats.

petapixel.com

This will make the most difference in shadow detail jpeg has only 16 grades of black, move up to 12 bit and you have ~1000. The problem arises, when you have 16 shades of black, and you increase your exposure so that it it’s in a zone that has 2000 possibilities. Translateing 16 into ~1000 will almost certainly created banding, however, you may have had to expose the way you did to properly expose a sunset. You can say, just always do the correct exposure, however, in reality, often the DR of the sensor doens’t cover the full DR of the scene. We have a choice, correctly expose the shadows, or correctly expose the brighter parts of the image. When like in the top image, I wanted the sky correctly exposed, the detail I got in the shadows, anything not in direct sun, looks natural, because of the colour depth in the darker parts of the image. The greens of the trees along the shoreline and the saturation, are made possible only by colour depth. You could use the jpg HDR function, but I find it rarely produces the kind of image I’m trying for.

 

[Thiophilos]

I have shot raw because that's what the big boys do. I figured it would pay off on the back end. My problem is that the photo previews on my camera's screen look awful, so I don't know whether they're any good or not until I edit them. This makes me unsure as to whether I should keep shooting.

What's the answer? Should I use two cards, shoot in two formats, and use jpg to preview photos?

Hi, William.

I see that the discussion is turning to bit depth and embedded JPGs, which I'm guessing is not your issue.

If your composition and lighting are good, then the photo displayed on the LCD of your camera should look very good.

Whether you shoot JPG only or RAW isn't going to make much difference if your pics look awful on the camera's screen.

Please post some examples of your "awful" photos to give us a clear idea of what you are seeing.

 

[21limited]

Whether you shoot JPG only or RAW isn't going to make much difference if your pics look awful on the camera's screen.

Shooting sunsets in raw, they may all not look terribly good, but some of them may be more open to processing into good files. SO how do you tell from the raw if you can rescue the image. That’s the issue as I understand it.
jpeg made from an unprocessed raw.
K5__5550 (1) by Norm Head, on Flickr

The final raw after post processing, the DR of the 14 EV DR camera was exceeded, the area around the sun, shadows and exposure have been boosted for quite bit more detail in the shadows. The highlights have been reudced in lumminance, SO the high end has been muted and the low end has been boosted.


Here is the same imager taken at the same time. Notice the improved shadow detail, created in post. The question is how does he know he can get the second from the jpeg creaated by the first.

K5__5550 by Norm Head, on Flickr

The question is, lookimg at the jpeg on the back screen how can you tell you can make image #2 out of image #1, when DR means you will have to manipulate the iamge to get what you want.

In this case an increase in shadow, moving the slider to the left, using highlight suppression, boosting over all colour saturation, but reducing red and yellow channels to try and prevent blowout around the sun. (Sorry about the banding, this was quick and dirty comparison, with the image being 125kb instead of my usual 1 Mb.

SO the question is how do you know what you can make my final image from of the raw image. My answer would be expereince, and experimentation. You can tell from the back screen image that it’s going to need work, so you shoot raw and see what you can make of it. The trick is to shoot so you can manipulate shadow details and highlights. You need to split the high end and the dark end so you have room to manipulate both. If you blow out your sun, the area around it will be too big and look no different after post processing. If you aren’t close enough to tthe prefeered shadow detail you won’t be able to boot it. But you can clearly see, there is room to move that isn’t visible in the back screen jpeg. Sorry for the poor quality, as I said, quick and easy wrokflow to deomstrate. a point.

This is an similar image worked on to the point I was happy with it.
2012-05-15-Opalescent-Lake-Campsite by Norm Head, on Flickr
If you shoot with high sun in low contrast situtions with flat lighting, maybe th jobeg shown on the back sreen or in the viewfinder will do. If you shoot in high contrast situations in raw, the jpeg in the viewfinder or bak screen doesn’t tell you a lot about what you can do with the captured image, correct exposure or not.

It’s possible some always shoot in poor quality light and never have both the sun and deep shadow in the same image. However, inferior lighting and low contrast make for inferior and undramatic images.

 

[Thiophilos]

@21limited , I'm a raw file advocate, always shoot raw. Agreed that there are way more processing options with raw files.

However, most well-exposed, well-composed, and well-lit pics don't need to be raw. JPG will give results that are indistinguishable from raw.

Maybe the OP needs to shoot raw and learn how to post-process. And maybe not. We don't understand the OP's situation very well. Let's see if we can get more info before offering advice.

 

[21limited]

"However, most well-exposed, well-composed, and well-lit pics don't need to be raw. JPG will give results that are indistinguishable from raw."

I believe I indicated that in my posts. My point was, a lot of the best images are not well lit, are high contrast etc.
So, my point is, are you really going to evaluate whether each images should be taken raw or jpg? Or should you use raw all the time? If you take an image in jpg and later understand it’s wasn’t a good choice, there is nothing you can do at that point. You’ve lost your opportunity. This is an experienced based approach, not to be influenced by academic debate. In my world, what works always takes precedence over what theoretically should be.

I provided images to support my case that required a raw workflow. The OP is free to look at them an say “that type of images is not relevant to me.” I’ve given the OP the information to make his own choice. Claiming being aware of the different sides of the subject is in some way damaging…. I’m kind of speechless. Ya, "education is bad, just use jpg.” “I lke jpeg, no need to listen to any other opinion unless the OP specifically requests it.” Is that where you’re going?

In that case, why would the least capable workflow be the default? No one is sitting there forcing the OP to read all or any of this. But other people reading the thread may be paying attention, even if the OP isn’t.

How to Tell Whether Raw Photos are Keepers?​

That’s the question. “Shoot jpeg" isn’t the answer, or even related to the answer.

 

[480sparky]

Unless you need as high a frame rate as you can get without bogging the camera down by shooting raw, then shoot raw. Memory is cheap these days, both in memory cards and hard drive space. Don't bother trying to determine if a shot is good on that teeny screen on the back of your camera. Take advantage of that big monitor back home.

If you're culling images in the field, you're not only wasting time but potentially deleting images that could be keepers.

 

[21limited]

You only get a full jpeg in the jpeg file.
But you get the most data in a raw file, and you can export in jpeg, after editing and get the full benefit of both raw and jpeg. Selected in post processing raw information, in a smaller file package. Whereas you can’t create a full raw file from a jpeg. If you use jpeg, you are throwing away information. Once done you can’t get it back if you need it.

Raw = all the iinformation captured by the sensor.
Jpeg SOC) =equals selected information in a smaller file size.
All information is in he raw. WHen the camera creates a jpeg, it deicde what of that informtion is important and how it will be portrayed, then throws away that at it considers to be irrelevant. I prefer to decide for myself what’s relevant and what isn’t.

WHen I decide I don’t like the processing, I go back to the raw, not the jpeg or HEIC. If you only take a jpeg off your camera, you don’t have the saem information the camera used, only what it selected.

 

[smoke665]

Just a friendly reminder, that the OP title is "How to Tell Whether Raw Photos are Keepers?", not JPEG vs RAW.

As the image you see on the back screen is a JPEG created by the camera with all its proprietary algorithms applied and the histogram is a representation of that JPEG, it's somewhat a conundrum as to the RAW file IQ. That's where experience comes in, if the camera view looks good and the camera histogram shows a full data file then it's highly likely you have a workable RAW file. That's not say that a bad JPEG/ histogram can't be saved/worked, but that's a decision to be made post,

 

[wfooshee]

Shooting sunsets in raw, they may all not look terribly good, but some of them may be more open to processing into good files. SO how do you tell from the raw if you can rescue the image. That’s the issue as I understand it.
jpeg made from an unprocessed raw.
K5__5550 (1) by Norm Head, on Flickr

The final raw after post processing, the DR of the 14 EV DR camera was exceeded, the area around the sun, shadows and exposure have been boosted for quite bit more detail in the shadows. The highlights have been reudced in lumminance, SO the high end has been muted and the low end has been boosted.


Here is the same imager taken at the same time. Notice the improved shadow detail, created in post. The question is how does he know he can get the second from the jpeg creaated by the first.

K5__5550 by Norm Head, on Flickr

The question is, lookimg at the jpeg on the back screen how can you tell you can make image #2 out of image #1, when DR means you will have to manipulate the iamge to get what you want.

In this case an increase in shadow, moving the slider to the left, using highlight suppression, boosting over all colour saturation, but reducing red and yellow channels to try and prevent blowout around the sun. (Sorry about the banding, this was quick and dirty comparison, with the image being 125kb instead of my usual 1 Mb.

SO the question is how do you know what you can make my final image from of the raw image. My answer would be expereince, and experimentation. You can tell from the back screen image that it’s going to need work, so you shoot raw and see what you can make of it. The trick is to shoot so you can manipulate shadow details and highlights. You need to split the high end and the dark end so you have room to manipulate both. If you blow out your sun, the area around it will be too big and look no different after post processing. If you aren’t close enough to tthe prefeered shadow detail you won’t be able to boot it. But you can clearly see, there is room to move that isn’t visible in the back screen jpeg. Sorry for the poor quality, as I said, quick and easy wrokflow to deomstrate. a point.

This is an similar image worked on to the point I was happy with it.
2012-05-15-Opalescent-Lake-Campsite by Norm Head, on Flickr
If you shoot with high sun in low contrast situtions with flat lighting, maybe th jobeg shown on the back sreen or in the viewfinder will do. If you shoot in high contrast situations in raw, the jpeg in the viewfinder or bak screen doesn’t tell you a lot about what you can do with the captured image, correct exposure or not.

It’s possible some always shoot in poor quality light and never have both the sun and deep shadow in the same image. However, inferior lighting and low contrast make for inferior and undramatic images.

This post highlights not only what you can recover from a RAW file that would be unusable in a JPEG file, but it also highlights the fact that the camera cannot record what you're looking at with your eye, and it's vital that photographers understand the difference.

As you look at a scene with your Mark 1 Human Eyeball, the only part of the scene being processed by your brain is what you're directly looking at. If you're looking at the far shoreline, the foreground and campfire are irrelevant, but you see the far shoreline very clearly. As your eye moves to the campfire, everything else become irrelevant. You can see the dancing flames of the campfire pretty well, unless the flame is bright enough to actually be painful to look at. Then you move your eye to the near shoreline, or to the rocks immediately in front of you. Again, everything else in the scene becomes irrelevant, and your brain process and displays that near shoreline or those rocks perfectly. Your brain closes or opens the iris in your eye according to what your eye is pointed to, looking at directly. You have auto-exposure for the small piece of the scene you are actually looking at. As you look around the scene, if you don't realize how much exposure difference there is in the pieces you're looking at, you'll be thinking to yourself, "What a lovely shot this is going to make!"

The camera is completely incapable of making those exposure decisions around the entire scene. It records the entire scene with a single exposure value setting combination of aperture and shutter speed, either making a best guess from its metering, or using your best guess that you've applied to the settings manually. The range of exposure values in the scene exceeds the camera's ability to record them all, and you get excessive brights and then dark areas with no detail. The image was salvaged (if that's really the right word) on the computer by bringing up the exposures in the dark areas, and accepting the highlights in the sunset glare, which were pretty much blown out anyway. His description of the process, using color correction as well as exposure correction, points out how saving such an image might be difficult, but that workflow gets easier with experience, as you try things and find what works. For example, with the second image, he's thinking, "Well dang, that's better in the foreground but it really screwed up the sky! That looks like a cartoon or something!" and that's when he started in with the color corrections he described.

My point overall is that the photographer must realize that the camera is incapable of accurately recording what he's looking at when there is a wide range of light values (dynamic range, as 21limited pointed out using the letters DR) in the scene. HDR might have done justice to this scene, or might have introduced its own set of difficulties. HDR would require several shots from the exact position, rather difficult if handheld, even with continuous high-speed shutter release.

 

[Thiophilos]

OP is not participating in the discussion.

 

[AlanKlein]

It's actually manufacturer variable. My Canon G7xmkii embeds a full size JPEG in the raw file. My Fujis embed a downsized JPEG.

I believe full size would refer to resolution. But what about compression? How is that determined?

 

[AlanKlein]

I shoot Jpeg plus Raw. When I shoot on vacation, and the shots will be used just a travel slide show for myself and family, 98% of the jpegs are acceptable. I might apply an increase in saturation to all the shots and that;s it. I still can use the RAws for the 2% that need more help. It;s just a waste of time to edit from Raw for a vacation. For "artsy" shots, then I can spend my time on RAW. So the point is, what you intend to do with the photos defines your process.