RAW-NEF VS. JPG. some questions

[Garbz]

That's lucky for you but there are plenty of cameras which just flat out get white balance wrong in Auto. The D200 is my example. I shoot in Auto and there's always a purple tinge when shooting in forest / green conditions, and there's always an orange tinge when I shoot in overcast conditions.

The way RAW fixes this it that the white balance values are completely selectable after the fact making it childsplay to get neutral lighting. It's also what comes most recommended to people who have any white balance issues (though sometimes incorrectly people just read WB in the title and say RAW is the solution when it's not). Mind you I also base my theory that the very large majority of people now picking up their first DSLR are very computer proficient (they are after all researching on an online forum), which would imply learning the software is going to be a breeze compared to learning photography. Anecdote: My girlfriend and sister both shoot RAW, but my dad couldn't figure out how to import images into Lightroom, so RAW is definitely not a solution for him (and probably won't ever be).

Anywho I stand by my statement and I think all we can do is agree to disagree Happens a lot on this forum.

 

[Shockey]

Yes we agree to disagree, I like when adults can do that and stay civil.

 

[Jon_Are]

Alright, guess I'll weigh in.

I can see both sides of the argument. I jumped into RAW relatively early, and I should have done it even sooner. I have many early images - in JPG, of course - that I would now love to have a crack at in RAW.

If the beginner has any aspirations whatsoever about taking this photography thang to any level of seriousness at all, (and, I would think most who join a photo forum are), s/he owes it to her/himself to grab CS4 (or Elements) and Lightroom and learn about RAW.

If you are serious, it has to happen.

If it has to happen, sooner is better than later.

Jon

 

[BoblyBill]

I too have to side with Garbz. When I started shooting back in 2006, I started off in RAW. I don't think to this day that I have ever taken a picture simply in jpeg unless it was a test shot or for custom white balance, and although the learning curve of RAW was daunting, I am SO SO SO happy I did. The reason is simple. I have numerous times gone back to my shots that I have taken in 2006-2008 and reproccessed the ones that I liked because I have learned how to control shadows and highlights and color so so so much better now. You know even as a noob, you'll have those lucky shots that could really go somewhere if you knew how to just proccess it right and if I would have shot any of earlier ones JPEG, there would a ton of them that I just couldn't quite get the image I'm looking for because I would be limited with the bit depth not to mention white balance. JPEGs start banding much much sooner than RAWs do and if you have to correct both exposure and white balance a lot of times that is the backbreaker for a JPEG. Here's senario for ya (one that is very probable)... Let's say you have just bought a camera and know nothing of white balance, bit depth, or histograms. You go out and in full auto start shooting a scene, and you get a shot that is composed extremely well of a beautiful landscape, but your camera being in full auto (which on most cameras means also large JPEG, I do believe) meters wrong because it was too backlit or some such thing. You go back home and load these pictures into your computer, only to find this picture does not look as good as you remember, but you try to recover it anys only to fail. You can't get the highlights to look right or the shadows are to dark and they get noisy and funny looking so you abandon the picture. Now, lets say 5 years down the road you have been not able to get out and shoot due to weather or something and are looking through all your old stuff and come across that picture again. You now being a much more expiernced shooter recognize the potential of this shot and redue it. You have been shooting with RAW for a couple of years now and have a much greater understanding of shadows, highlights, histograms, white balance, sharpness, contrast, bit depth, and the works. So, you go and try to make something out of this old shot. You will probably come away with a better shot but you will be limited in how much you can recover and it's possible it would be too much for the shot and you start to get banding and noise in the shadows. If this was RAW to begin with, you would have a much much better chance of going back through old files and finding those gems and recovering them than if you started out shooting in JPEG.

A good example of this concept is this shot I took last year (please understand I'm not trying to boast about my work or get viewing time, I'm only using this shot as an example of my senario):

I took this last year on a vacation and totally forgot about this trip. I shot this using three exposures, but what IF I was just starting out and didn't know how to auto bracket and someone had said you don't need to use RAW until you have learned how to shoot? My camera might have metered this (which is the middle shot of the three exposures):

I guaranttee you that you would not be able to get the final image that I have made just with a JPEG. In fact, I tried.. I shoot in RAW+JPEG and I have the JPEG file of middle exposure.

Here's my attempt with a single JPEG:

Here's my attempt with the RAW version of that same shot:

Ironicly... the JPEG took me WAY more time to get it even that good compared to the time it took me to get the bottom shot. I couldn't even get the color of the sky right (what sky is there) without going and manually coloring it the color I wanted which would take even more time. With the RAW I just had to fix the white balance, take it down an exposure, and then mess with a couple of curve layers. The JPEG shot has three curve layers as well as a color balance layer, I still couldn't pull a lot of info out of the sky.

 

[Shockey]

My point is that for a new person just getting going with this photography thing the learning curve in front of them is daunting. Far from the biggest priority in front of them is learning to shoot in Raw when first starting out.
I shot Jpeg for 3 years before I even took a sniff at Raw, at that time I was ready to move to the next level.
Now I shoot just about everything in Raw, the only major benefit I get from it is that it give me greater flexibility in saving overexposures, because I process in Lightroom and it is just as easy to process Raw and Jpeg pretty much the exact same way.

If I posted 6 photos, 3 of them in raw and 3 of them in jpeg of different scenes, I guarantee you there is no one out there that would be able to tell which was which.

Those us of that have been at this awhile have all achieved a workflow that works for us. There are a lot of people out there that only shoot Jpeg and achieve results every bit as good as those who shoot in Raw.

My only point for this OP is that right now he is not at a point where he needs to make the choice and that he would be better served with Jpeg at this stage.

This topic always becomes polarized with strong opinions on both sides. As long as the discussion remains civil it can be kind of fun to banter back and forth.

 

[Derrel]

I think the newer cameras, the "smarter" cameras, do a much better job with in-camera JPEG processing than older cameras did. The newer,smarter Canons have the Highlight Tone Priority option and the newer Nikons have Active D-Lighting, as well as scene modes that try to optimize the SOC (straight out of camera) JPEG files, based on what the user has selected, such as Nikon's Direct Print JPEG option, or the Portrait or Vivid JPEG options. Some companies, like Olympus, are known for beautiful SOC JPEG captures.

My preference is to shoot RAW + JPEG with the JPEG set to Large size, Fine compression or Normal size, Fine compression, with in-camera Noise Reduction set to On at +1 level. Occasionally, I will shoot RAW+ JPEG in the Mononchrome mode, sepia tone option, yellow filter with Canon, and the SOC B&W JPEG files look really good. The RAW data however, has all the color information. Some of the newer cameras can create lovely B&W images right in the camera. If I want B&W images, I prefer to shoot and evaluate the results in the field on the LCD by viewing in monochrome,without the distraction of color. The camera itself often makes a prettier monochrome image than many RGB>monochrome conversions done in Photoshop, IMHO.

Nikon 's D2x creates SOC JPEGs with Noise Reduction that are pretty close to optimal for that camera. I think the newer, better software apps like Lightroom have really sped up and simplified the workflow over older-school apps from a few years ago. RAW gives you a much deeper file that has more "workability" than a JPEG file in the editing process; the RAW image has much more data than the JPEG, and you can make more-extreme corrections on a RAW before the image begins to posterize or break down. My feeling is that RAW+ JPEG Large Fine is the safest way to shoot things in tricky lighting conditions, or when the white balance is critical, or when you need to capture really bright tones, like sky, and lower values as well.

In sidelighting or backlighted conditions, I'm often not happy with SOC JPEG files, and always shoot raw on work I *care about* or when the lighting is *tough*. As always, it depends on the individual,and to a certain extent, the camera they have and how that camera processes the JPEGs.

 

[BoblyBill]

Am I passionate about shooting RAW, yes. Do I want to cause anger and spitting, absolutely no. Do I want to help inform the OP of the advantages of RAW, of course. But I don't want to make everyone think that it's my way or the highway. In all honesty, JPEGs will give EXACT results of a RAW image without having to proccess the RAW image in software in all situations except when you shot an image and it didn't turn out the way you expected (user error) or you knew the scene had a larger dynamic range than the JPEG could handle. And for a begginer, having to learn a subject like RAW is a lot to throw at them. Yes, there is a longer workflow (for me it's one extra step if I shot it right in camera more if I didn't) if you are just starting out, yes they take up WAY more space (at least mine do) than a JPEG, but I guess my point is this. I'm a type of guy that would rather be as safe as possible than sorry, even if that means adding complication to my workflow. I learned RAW with my first digital when I just started out shooting cause I heard that there was a difference. I didn't utilize RAW at all because I shot in auto wb which did a preaty good job (at least I couldn't tell the difference back then) and I could only work in 8bit mode anyways so I didn't even do anything to them except send them to Photoshop which in turn converted them to a 8bit file. So basically, I shot JPEG but they were in a RAW costume.

I think there is two sides of the camp with the same goal here. There is the side that says learn to shoot RAW now cause your going to probably naturally head that ways anyways, and the other side that says shoot in JPEG and get the basics down first before you are thrown the RAW curveball, but the end result here, I believe, is to help the new shooters to become better shooters.

I guess for me RAW is like giving someone a pocket knife that has 16bit of different tools and JPEG is like giving someone a pocket knife that has 8bit. I would rather give someone the 16bit pocket knife and teach them to use 8bits of it at first so that they have a 16bit tool all the time. Now the pocket knife will be heavier and it will take a longer time to even pull out the 8bit of tools but you have 16bit to work with if and when you are ever out in the wilderness and need 16bits. I can tell you even if you didn't know how to use 16bits if you were up against a bear and needed 16bits you would learn pretty quickly on how to use it.

Of course, the problem with this approuch is that it might be too much for a beginner and they might give up on the sport of having that pocket knife altogether even if you gave him an 8bit one after he gave up on the 16bit.

On the other side, I guess (I'm not sure really the thought behind the other way so please help me out here) you could look at the pocket knife senerio from giving a man the 8bit first knowing that 99 times out of 100 he'll never need the other 8bit of tools the other pocket knife has to offer so why burden him with the monster? Am I right on your view?

But looking at both sides of the coin, I would rather tell someone to start off with RAW, cause you can easily ignore it's benefits and use it just like a JPEG with one or two extra steps, then once he/she learns how to use the other 8bit of info contained in a RAW file he/she can go back to his older files and improve them even more on top of make sure he/she has a bigger safety net to fall into if something goes wrong. To me... giving up space and time is better than possibly missing a shot.

Do I think those that like JPEGs are wrong, absolutely no! Nor will I name call, bite, spit, or troll on this matter. This is just a humble opinion of a still rather new photographer.

 

[Shockey]

It is all good.
To simplify...I would much rather see a new shooter outside with his camera shooting jpegs and learning the craft of taking good pictures that sitting at his computer trying to figure out how to process in raw.

 

[BoblyBill]

Gotcha... I guess when I started I was trying to do both (learn RAW and learn to take good pictures (which I'm still learning to do both and still need the practice)) and I figured if I could so could others.

 

[HotWire]

So a question from a noob for yall then. What makes shooting in Raw more difficult than Jpeg? Im just curious since I have been just using raw format and using lightroom beta to adjust light, contrast, etc... I have never used any of this before so I was just curious since I cant really find a good answer on this. I do know that raw files give your more ability to adjust stuff but only becuase others have said so and not from personal experience.

Is there something I am missing from shooting in raw?

On a side note* I really like that picture of the bridge. the colors are beautiful. It has to be one of my all time favorites that I have seen.

 

[Garbz]

No, but then your method bypasses all this since RAW and JPEGs essentially are processed the same way.

What is more difficult is that some people don't put any effort into their photos at all after pushing the button. None. Nada. Zip. For them the photography is finished. They do not wish to create a nicely fine tuned preset in Lightroom, heck they don't even want to import photos into Lightroom in the first place.

RAW being more difficult is an argument used a lot by people who are either not post processing their images, not going about it the wrong way, or who simply don't understand that cameras can shoot RAW+JPEG so they retain the power and slackness that they are already accustomed to.

 

[TiaS]

I am new to having an SLR and when I first got it I shot in JPEG as it was all that I knew. I had heard about RAW but had no idea what it was. Someone told me to try it because if I did I'll never shoot JPEG again. I did it just for this person. I tried it. Than I downloaded a plug-in for GIMP and played with my RAW image. I was sure it would be complicated but it wasn't. It was easy to use and easy to convert. My friend was right. I will never go back. Shooting in RAW allows you to save pictures that would otherwise be garbage. You can change your white balance, your exposure, take out some of the colors or shift the coloring, all before it is JPEG. For myself, it was easy to do and I have only shot in RAW-JPEG since, but I only use my JPEG's to help sort through them, not to keep.

I encourage you to try RAW. I don't think you will go back to shooting JPEG once you do.