Raw shooting help

Danny_511

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I shot jpeg my entire young career (it made one year in march) primarily because when I first got into photography, i asked for a point and shoot because 1. Its a recession and 2. I didn't feel I was ready for a dslr. After winning a few competitions and saving up, my mom and I bought me my first dslr. The jpeg files were nice and all but I decided I wanted to try raw, only to find out I couldnt view or edit raw files on my tablet (I used my galaxy tab 2 10.1 to edit because its convenient and I had photoshop touch) a couple weeks ago, my uncle's girlfriend (a computer tech) gave me one of her macbooks. The macbook has the full cs4 suite. I shot raw for the first time yesterday and LOVED it. I loved the quality, the image control, everything.

My question is this, I know people shoot raw to avoid jpeg compression, but I like to share my work on instagram and we all know, id need to convert the file. If I convert it to jpeg, am I losing quality? If I make it a PNG will i lose less? Any tips or tricks would be very much appreciated. Try not to lay into me too bad, im a noob with raw.
 
My digital camera is DNG so it automatically produces a Raw image and a JPEG from that. But I usually save the DNG image as a JPEG if I need it in that size (for submission to a juried exhibit, etc.) because the quality is better than what's generated automatically.

Why not try shooting a test shot in Raw and convert it to a JPEG and see if that will work for you? At worst you'd probably just have one messed up funky picture wouldn't you? LOL which you can delete...

I didn't find that shooting raw was nearly as difficult as I'd thought it would be, I just found that basically I needed to do the same thing as when I'm shooting film - get the image framed the way I want, focus well, get a proper exposure, etc. If I do that I don't find that the quality difference is huge between my original DNG image and the copy I save as a JPEG.
 
My digital camera is DNG so it automatically produces a Raw image and a JPEG from that. But I usually save the DNG image as a JPEG if I need it in that size (for submission to a juried exhibit, etc.) because the quality is better than what's generated automatically.

Why not try shooting a test shot in Raw and convert it to a JPEG and see if that will work for you? At worst you'd probably just have one messed up funky picture wouldn't you? LOL which you can delete...

I didn't find that shooting raw was nearly as difficult as I'd thought it would be, I just found that basically I needed to do the same thing as when I'm shooting film - get the image framed the way I want, focus well, get a proper exposure, etc. If I do that I don't find that the quality difference is huge between my original DNG image and the copy I save as a JPEG.


Cool guys, thanks. :)
 
"Shooting raw" isn't all that much different than 'shooting JPEG'. About the biggest difference is the file size, hence you may see your buffer fill up faster if you have a slow camera and a fast trigger finger.

Once you get to the computer, however, you'll need to dedicate more time at the keyboard.
 
I don't find that shooting DNG/Raw I necessarily have to do much editing/post processing, sometimes I print straight out of the camera. If I was shooting in lower light I usually need to do some brightening etc. but if I was shooting in decent outdoor light I usually don't. I'm a longtime film photographer so I'm used to whatever I get in camera is what I get in my photo.
 
I don't find that shooting DNG/Raw I necessarily have to do much editing/post processing, sometimes I print straight out of the camera. If I was shooting in lower light I usually need to do some brightening etc. but if I was shooting in decent outdoor light I usually don't. I'm a longtime film photographer so I'm used to whatever I get in camera is what I get in my photo.

Yeah, I love digital but film has my heart. I'm self taught and started off using film. I owned about 7 35mm cameras (two canonet ql17s, two eos rebel slrs, an original konica autoreflex, an AE1, a nikon n80) and two TLRs. Lol it was an obsession but I had to let a couple go so I could get a dslr.
 

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