Post shot editing?

KMANACP · May 18, 2012

Hey everyone,

I've been lurking on here for quite a while... figured I'd just man up and make an account.

I have a T2i and a 50mm f1.8 + the stock 55mm lens. I'm not looking to purchase a new lens for around a year or so... but I've been really getting into photography and believe my next lens will be an L.

I just had a question regarding editing photographs because I'm a little confused. I was told to always shoot in RAW which I do, however, are there any tutorials to editing the photograph after shot? From what I saw on youtube... people just plug the photo into Lightroom and play around with the saturation, exposure, etc.... I can do the same thing with my JPEG on iPhoto... Why shoot RAW? Should I be focusing more on getting the right shot rather than the editing that follows?

Any advice would be appreciated!

ann · May 18, 2012

Do what feels best for you, not what some faceless person on the internet decides you should be doing.

Raw has advantages and it has disadvantages, just as jpeg. But there is a learning curve with pp and raw as well.

You might considered shooting both, if possible. Use the jpeg's until you decide that you need to be using RAW and then when and if that time arrives, you have the RAW files to work with; if your happy with the results with your jpegs , use them and just take more pictures with the time you will have not setting in front of the computer.'

TCampbell · May 18, 2012

I can't speak for Lightroom... it's been too long since I used it. I use Aperture - which is essentially the direct competitor to LR.

When I "shoot" the RAW, the camera won't make any modifications to the image which result in an unrecoverable loss of original image data. Hold that thought.

When you shoot a JPEG, the camera automatically does *some* post processing right in the camera. The camera will apply white balance, edge detection & sharpening, de-noising, etc. If you've selected any special filters (e.g. B&W or a color style, etc.) then those would be applied as well.

When you shoot RAW, those adjustments will not be applied by the camera because they would result in a loss of original data. In other words... the camera might not do the right thing and you wouldn't necessarily be able to undo it. There are many many other benefits to shooting in RAW... JPEG is an 8-bit format, but RAW on your camera is a 14 bit format. When you look at how "stops" of dynamic range work, you realize that it's not technically possible for JPEG to have more than 8 stops of range (even though the camera is capable of more) and the tonality of the lower 3 stops is so awful that you wouldn't actually want to use them. That leaves you with about 5 stops of "usable" dynamic range in a JPEG, vs RAW giving you whatever the sensor can handle (usually at least twice as much.)

This means that if I were to shoot in the "RAW + JPEG" mode where the camera produces both images, and then import them into the computer using a generic utility which won't edit them as it imports, you'll could compare and notice that certain things like detail and dynamic range will look better in RAW, but other things such as white balance, sharpness, and noise might actually look better in the JPEG.

The RAW workflow would normally imply that you'd start by adjusting the white balance, sharpness, and noise. EXCEPT... Aperture (my RAW workflow software) has a "camera profile" for my camera (it comes with it... I don't have to build it. It comes with profiles for lots of cameras.) It understands the typical levels of adjustment that need to be applied to a RAW based on the camera & lens being used and these adjustments are auto-applied.

As a result, when I import into Aperture (and I'm going to guess that it's probably very similar for Lightroom) a lot of work was just automatically done for me. At this point the JPEG won't look better (and all I did was connect the camera's memory card and let Aperture import the images) -- the RAW will look noticeable better. I can then continue to apply additional adjustments as desired.

If you are shooting RAW, you may want to grab a decent RAW workflow tool such as Lightroom or Aperture (btw, Aperture only runs on Mac since it's made by Apple. So if you're on Windows... just get Lightroom). I'm sometimes surprised to learn that people use Photoshop as their "only" photo editing tool because, while it is unquestionably powerful, it's not particularly streamlined... tools such as Lightroom & Aperture are vastly more optimized & streamlined toward a RAW "workflow" and make post processing and management move much faster.

SirenCherie · May 18, 2012

^^ Amazing response, Tim! Thanks for that knowledge. I'm also an Aperture user/fanatic.

KMANACP · May 18, 2012

Thank you for the info... you're all a knowledgable bunch. For now I think I will stick with my JPEGs until I fully get the hang of the proper settings for taking a shot... then I will move into that realm.

Thanks again!