RAW Question?

[solrac8126]

I don't know if this is something that everyone has preferences of their own.

But i'll like to know your opinions on WHEN or WHY shoot RAW or JPG


I know if i want to print BIG i need more MP but let's say i only shoot and never print or never print a banner, i guess the bigger i'll print will be like a 8.5*11 page.

 

[confucious]

Raw is not necessarily a choice for the overall size of the image but rather for the amount of information that is contained in the image. This sounds contradictory, I know, but it makes sense.

The RAW image is processed very little by the camera itself. When you shoot JPEG there is a process that goes on as it is stored that strips some of the data from the image and sets certain values. These then cannot be restored. RAW omits this process allowing YOU to do it later (adjust white balance, brightness, shot settings etc.).

Essentially it gives you much more control later in the image making process...some prefer to just shoot and have done with it. Your camera's largest JPEG setting should be fine for printing all sorts of big stuff - RAW is not necessary for that.

 

[Fiendish Astronaut]

I always shoot RAw unless I'm being asked to provide pictures immediately to somebody. RAW takes time but alongside the right bit of software WILL get you better results (unless you nail the JPG absolutely perfectly in camera and the colour is already exactly how you want it).

The other reason I might use JPG is if I'm shooting 1,000 pictures in a day! The amont of memory and post processing required for that would make using RAW totally impractical. RAW has nothing to do with megapixels though - however you'll get more size options in your camera's menu if your shooting JPG.

 

[Big Mike]

You can make a JPEG out of a RAW file...but you can't go the other way and make a RAW out of a JPEG.

So why not shoot in the very best format that you can...all the time?

JPEGs are for saving space.

 

[yeti]

RAW does not contain your image, but rather all the incredients + the recipe. The ingredients are the content of every cell of your CCD, and the recipe is the list of every manipulation your camera does on the raw data. It is your viewer that "renders" the final image for you, the RAW file itself is not your image. This allows you full control over the recipe for the final image, including changing it after the fact. A RAW image allows you to do some pretty remarkable post-processing, like "restore" color of a B&W image and stuff (in reality it was always there as RAW doesn't change the raw data).

JPEG, on the other hand, is an image format. It is just the final product: a lot of information is now thrown out as the image is considered final. You also have compression losses, so further post-processing is destructive to the image. JPEG is the end of the line for every image regardless how you shoot it, so JPEG is great when you trust your camera to do the adequate post-processing for you.

When to shoot one versus the other: JPEG is good if you know that you won't post-process your images further. Shoot JPEG in cases when you will be printing images directly from your camera and are not interested in the unprocessed version. Shoot RAW for everything else.

 

[skipper34]

RAW does not contain your image, but rather all the incredients + the recipe. The ingredients are the content of every cell of your CCD, and the recipe is the list of every manipulation your camera does on the raw data. It is your viewer that "renders" the final image for you, the RAW file itself is not your image. This allows you full control over the recipe for the final image, including changing it after the fact. A RAW image allows you to do some pretty remarkable post-processing, like "restore" color of a B&W image and stuff (in reality it was always there as RAW doesn't change the raw data).

JPEG, on the other hand, is an image format. It is just the final product: a lot of information is now thrown out as the image is considered final. You also have compression losses, so further post-processing is destructive to the image. JPEG is the end of the line for every image regardless how you shoot it, so JPEG is great when you trust your camera to do the adequate post-processing for you.

When to shoot one versus the other: JPEG is good if you know that you won't post-process your images further. Shoot JPEG in cases when you will be printing images directly from your camera and are not interested in the unprocessed version. Shoot RAW for everything else.

Not true! I shoot JPEG all the time and I can and do post-process in PS. The "lossy" compression only occurs if I have saved an image as a JPEG and then reopened it for further post-process. It is true that the camera will render some of the data as unusable when it saves an image as a JPEG file, however if the image is downloaded and then converted to a TIFF, which is what I always do when shooting JPEG, the data loss is a non-issue. RAW files simply enable the shooter to have a much wider latitude for exposure after the fact, such as white-balance adjustment and sharpening. I find that if the image is good to start with, then there is very little post-processing needed. This is what I try to do whenever I take a photo.

 

[Happy Hour]

Not true! I shoot JPEG all the time and I can and do post-process in PS. The "lossy" compression only occurs if I have saved an image as a JPEG and then reopened it for further post-process. It is true that the camera will render some of the data as unusable when it saves an image as a JPEG file, however if the image is downloaded and then converted to a TIFF, which is what I always do when shooting JPEG, the data loss is a non-issue. RAW files simply enable the shooter to have a much wider latitude for exposure after the fact, such as white-balance adjustment and sharpening. I find that if the image is good to start with, then there is very little post-processing needed. This is what I try to do whenever I take a photo.

I agree with this. I shoot majority of my pics in the highest Jpeg and the only thing I have a problem with in PP is if I have a picture that was way under exposed (like a dark pic in a bar) It's hard to lighten the pic without massive noise. In RAW it's sometimes recoverable. But the majority of my pics can be fixed very fast in Picasa and printed on a 8x 10 without any problems. I find it to be a pain in the rear to convert 300 pics to jpegs unless it's something important like a wedding. Then RAW is always the way to go just 2 be safe.

 

[EOS_JD]

The other reason I might use JPG is if I'm shooting 1,000 pictures in a day! The amont of memory and post processing required for that would make using RAW totally impractical. RAW has nothing to do with megapixels though - however you'll get more size options in your camera's menu if your shooting JPG.

I shoot 1000+ images at a wedding and Lightroom makes short work of editing these. RAW nearly all the way for me. Only use for jpg is to view my images in my P-2000 or if I need to print from my Selphy on-site.

 

[Tasmaster]

I shoot RAW when i think the photo sill be tricky or if i can see myself working on it a long time in PP to get various results. The more i shoot, the more i tend towards RAW; if i am going to fiddle with my camera settings more than once during a shoot, i might as well do it a lot better on the computer.

 

[skipper34]

The bottom line as far as Raw vs. JPEG is that both will work. It all depends on what the photographer is comfortable with. I like shooting JPEG because it shortens my workflow somewhat. By converting my JPEG's to Tiff and saving them in the computer, I have no worries about lossy compression. When I shoot a wedding I will commonly take up to 1000 frames. For me, JPEG's work fine, and there is less time involved at the computer. I have yet to have a client tell me that they want their images in Raw. They would be hard-pressed to know the difference anyway. If a shooter is using Raw format and is comfortable with it, then he or she should by all means use it. The same can be said for JPEG. Neither is the right or wrong way. If the results are satisfactory, then it doesn't matter which is used.

 

[Jeff Canes]

JPGs are like film, if to get them right to start with they are fine

 

[Helen B]

JPGs are like film, if to get them right to start with they are fine

How about 'JPGs are like colour slide film, if you get them right to start with they are usually fine if the subject brightness range isn't too great. Raw is like colour negative film.'?

Best,
Helen

 

[yeti]

Not true! I shoot JPEG all the time and I can and do post-process in PS. The "lossy" compression only occurs if I have saved an image as a JPEG and then reopened it for further post-process. It is true that the camera will render some of the data as unusable when it saves an image as a JPEG file, however if the image is downloaded and then converted to a TIFF, which is what I always do when shooting JPEG, the data loss is a non-issue. RAW files simply enable the shooter to have a much wider latitude for exposure after the fact, such as white-balance adjustment and sharpening. I find that if the image is good to start with, then there is very little post-processing needed. This is what I try to do whenever I take a photo.

Hi skipper34,

I never said that you can't post-process JPEG. What I said is that it's destructive to the image as you have compression losses. Saving in JPEG once creates compression artifacts, a sort of "ringing effect" around places with high contrast. Converting to TIFF doesn't get rid of them and resaving in JPEG creates compression artifacts for your compression artifacts (even worse). Once you have a JPEG step involved, you loose data. You might not see the losses, but that's the best thing about JPEG: it only "looses" stuff you are unlikely to perceive to begin with. That's also the worst thing about JPEG: it doesn't know what the point of your composition is, it just drops fine detail.

The beauty of RAW format is that the original CCD data is right there and you can manipulate it directly: you can do changes and undo changes. No other format, not even TIFF, would let you do that. Sometimes post-processing software try to compensate for that by internally keeping track of the changes you do, but that stops working the moment you save of your images. With RAW it works always, all the way until you are done post-processing and convert to JPEG.

 

[Jeff Canes]

How about 'JPGs are like colour slide film, if you get them right to start with they are usually fine if the subject brightness range isn't too great. Raw is like colour negative film.'?

Best,
Helen

I not sure about that, need to think about it some

 

[yeti]

I want to put an end to this discussion, so I will explain exactly what the JPEG format IS:

JPEG is designed to store images with minimum losses. I say "minimum" losses, not "lossless".

Internally your camera takes the data from the CCD and attempts to represent it as a series of periodic functions (sines and cosines). This is done in 2 dimensions. The transformation is called Two-Dimensional Fast Fourier Transform and can be translated into hardware readily: it has acceptable complexity and you can design a circuit to do it fast and in parallel. One of the highlights of a series is that it is endless. For the case of an image on a CCD, however, it is not: your CCD is not endless and it cannot encode infinite detail. There is a rule called Sampling Theorem kicking in, which says that you can encode ALL detail from a discrete and finite source of data, by sampling twice as fast as the smallest detail. In terms of your CCD, this means that your camera will sample twice per pixel. Your infinite series now becomes a finite sequence.

Now, storing all these periodic terms is pointless: the resulting image would be no smaller than a TIFF or a RAW. You want to "drop" some stuff so that you can free up some space and the question now is what to drop. You start going through the terms and you observe what each represents: the further away you go on each row or column, the higher "frequency" it encodes, which means finer detail. Looking at an image, you are unlikely to perceive some fine detail, so ultimately you camera drops a certain number of higher frequency terms so that it can save space. The result is an image that LOOKS like the original image, but is not, yet it is much smaller. The smaller image has sacrificed some contrast and fine detail, introducing a type of ringing effect around places of high contrast or fine detail leftover from the periodic nature of the terms dropped.

This is JPEG. I see that there is now a "lossless JPEG" format, but as far as I know no camera supports it yet. Needless to say it is about the size of a TIFF, so unless I am missing something, it is mostly a "completeness" thing, rather than something people want to use on a daily basis.

You can now argue that RAW is lossy as well as the CCD does not encode infinite detail. That is probably true, but I am not going there: it is not the format that looses the data, it's the digital nature of your camera.