"Why You Should be Shooting RAW" - Story on wired.com

[audiobomber]

See all that hideous yellow? See the poor exposure where shadows are lost? Yeah. RAW would have made that far less of a problem, and possibly even a non-issue. JPG? No way. That info was GONE.

RAW has a very real and distinct purpose. Use it if you care that your pictures are as good as they can possibly be. Period.

Jpegs can be edited, just not to the same extent. You could do better, it was hard to process without knowing what the original scene looked like.

 

[bhop]

When I first tried RAW files, I had a hard time getting them to look like I wanted compared to out of the camera jpgs. Once I had it figured out, there's really no going back for me. I only shoot raw, there's just no comparison.

Sounds like someone lives in a world where everyone has all the time in the world to post process every picture...

Personally, I do PP every picture I take. Keepers anyway... It might take a little longer, but I get the results I want because of it, and once you get used to it, it doesn't take very long at all.

 

[someguy5]

I'm convinced that all of these "pro-RAW" editorials are nothing but a scam to keep the memory card and storage markets afloat, along with propping up the RAW processing software companies. Click the "Why RAW" thread in my sig, but lets have a quick JPEG review...

Read it, and I think the most attractive feature for me is white balance correction... So many of my night/indoor shots are ruined because of this. Now I have a reason to use RAW.:thumbup:

 

[PhotoDonkey]

Well, I'm convinced to at least try RAW. If I'm going out with the fambly and need to be able to take alot of pictures, I can always switch to JPEG.

I'll probably start out shooting both, since my camera has that feature.

 

[Crosby]

Wow, what a thread... Ok, I'm convinced to shoot Raw, when I'm ready. I don't think I am ready yet since I'm still trying to practice on composing the shots. And I like to take a lot of shots.

I award the best advice to manaheim, :king:
"I actually tend to tell new people to shoot JPEG until they can't seem to get a shot to look the way they wanted it to (like due to discoloration from incandescant lights or something) and THEN switch to RAW."

 

[dEARlEADER]

I shoot both....

-In camera I only shoot RAW
-I import the RAW files using ViewNX
-I immediately convert them to high quality JPEG
-At the end of each month I burn the RAW's to disc for safe keeping and delete them from the drive

I mostly nail my in camera settings so what little editing I choose to do can be done with the jpeg. I also have the surety of having all the RAW files just in case, or for sometime in the future. Although I rarely use them.

I don't like the hype on RAW vs JPEG and I find myself swinging back and forth on the debate. So I hedge my bets and have both.

 

[PhotoDonkey]

Ok, as a test I shot some pictures in both RAW and JPEG formats (my camera has a feature that allows all pictures to be saved in both formats). After looking at the results, I'm sold. RAW images, unprocessed, appear to be slightly more crisp than JPEG. That alone is convincing.

I'll probably still shoot JPEG under certain circumstances (such as when I know I'll be taking a lot of photos before I will have a chance to back them up to PC), but at the very least I'll continue to shoot both if not strictly RAW.

 

[Mav]

First, if a highlight is blown, it's blown. You can't recover it in RAW, .jpg, or .bmp or any other format. It's gone, vamoosed, done like dinner. RAW however does allow you to recover a great dynamic range than jpg.

The chief objection to jpg is that it is a lossy format. That is, each time you open it, edit it, and then save it, you lose a little more data. Considering I sometimes push an image through the mill a half-dozen or more times trying different things, that can leave the final result (if shot in .jpg) looking less than ideal.

Well there you go. I use software that lets me do just about everything I need to in a single step, it never over-writes the original file so if I want to go back and re-do I can and I'm still starting from the same point. Once in awhile I need to do some plug-in stuff on top of that in another program, which results in at most a whopping two different saves. I've specifically tested this seeing where I start to truly see quality degradation. Going by what you read on the Internet a lot of people make it sound like you're going to have bad artifacting and horrible quality after a single save, but that's exaggerated and blown out of proportion too. Saving three times at high quality settings is about my limit. At that point if I blow an image up to 600% on my screen and compare it with the original, I can almost convince myself that I'm starting to see artifacting and other JPEG quality issues. But only if I have my nose into an image at 600%, only if I'm looking for them, and only if convince myself that I really am seeing it. So if I wanted to do more than 3 steps worth of post-processing, yeah you might as well just be shooting RAW, and dumping to TIFF or whatever immediately.

Also, I did not say that only RAW shooters take photographs and jpg shooters take pictures, and I'm sorry if it came out that way. I was suggesting that if you want to take a photograph (per my definition in the post) then RAW is a better format [IMHO]. If you're happy with .jpg, great. My belief is that since a Large, Fine .jpg on my camera weighs in at 5-7Mb and a 12 bit RAW at 20, then there has to be something useful in all that extra data.

The JPEG saves what you "need" and discards what you don't. It's entirely dependent on your style and what sort of PP work you like to do as to whether it'll be useful to you or not. For most people out there (not just people on these forums) it's not and JPEG is fine. I don't even use Fine JPEG settings. Normal is good enough. Heck even Basic is good enough.

 

[djacobox372]

to be honest i haven't spent a lot of time shooting in raw. raw is a million times better, im quite the purist, i hate it when people make ridiculously good photos on photoshop because there's no talent, and as someone says you should be able to compose the shot. but the advatages of raw over jpeg in my situation are that instead of taking 30 shots and keeping a good one you take 3 and keep 1 good one..its actually more of a purist approach because you can actually take a raw shot and not change it at all....this is obviously more pure than putting a lot of stuff on in-camera. in reality, raw and jpeg is roughly the same, thing is in raw you apply things like white balance etc after taking the shot, so its not more cheating than jpeg..

i dunno, if i see theyre just shots that i don't want to put a lot of importance into i'll shoot jpeg, but stuff im serious about, raw all the way

It takes no talent to create a ridiculously good photo in photoshop???

If an image is good it's good, how it gets there is a technicality.

 

[Mav]

Conspiracy theories? Come on, mav... Do you suppose us photogs pushing it are getting big kickbacks from Lexar for the extra $50 someone spent on the mem card 2x the size of the one they were originally going to purchase? :er:

That's more than a little silly.

I wasn't directing that comment at individual photogs, so thanks for taking my comments out of context. It was directed specifically at online and print magazines, who accept advertising money from none other than storage companies looking to sell you more space, and software companies looking to sell you more software. What sort of editorial angle do you think those companies would go for? Getting it right the first time straight off the camera, no or minimal post-processing, and JPEG so that you don't need larger storage investments?

If you don't see a benefit from raw, personally, fine... I would put you in the "less picky" bucket, and congrats to you for it.

I'm plenty picky. I just don't consider extremely minor differences that you'll never be able to see in actual prints to be a reason to shoot RAW. And since I try to get things right the first time right on the camera, that minimizes my need for RAW even further.

Me, personally... I don't trust the camera to do things right and it is a FACT that when recording the image to jpeg that the camera tosses out the data "you don't need". It's gone. Gone gone gone. And no matter how much fiddling is ever going to get back the picture you COULD have had at the same quality you could have had. (if you can even get the pic)

If your camera has sucky JPEG outputs then that's certainly true, but I have no complaints about my D40 and D80. They have never bombed out shadow details on me in nearly 25,000 shots between them, and you can always recover them if you want them more visible barring any massive technical mistake on your part. I've said before that if I shot other systems that didn't have JPEG outputs that are as nice as my Nikons that I would be far more likely to shoot RAW, but thankfully I don't have to. Both of my Nikons give me great JPEG outputs, and time and time again I've post-processed them side by side, and usually I can't even tell which was which when viewing both at a reasonable size and difference. Even pixel peeping I can't always tell which is which.

I have about 50 pictues from one session that were RUINED by incandescant street lights. This is exactly the time I realized I needed to shoot raw. Here is one of the ones that wasn't SO bad, and even it is a total train wreck.

http://www.wickedtiki.com/images/tpf/concstones.jpg

See all that hideous yellow? See the poor exposure where shadows are lost? Yeah. RAW would have made that far less of a problem, and possibly even a non-issue. JPG? No way. That info was GONE.

I have no clue what you were trying to achieve there, but if you had composed differently so that the lights in the background weren't getting into the shot, you could have exposed the foreground a lot better. Or if they were unavoidable you could have simply blown them out intentionally. You only have so much dynamic range on digital, and this is far exceeding that range. Heck, a different time of day you might have been able to get a much better photo of the same scene too. And you can still fix WB issues on JPEG just fine. I've only done it a few thousand times, some of which I've print 3 feet wide, and they look great. It really gets comical when people say you can't do stuff on JPEGs that I do all the time and get great results.

RAW has a very real and distinct purpose. Use it if you care that your pictures are as good as they can possibly be. Period.

Nope. If you care that your pictures are as good as they can possibly be, you'll try to get it right the first time straight off the camera and will wait for the best possible light in any 24 hr period to make that happen (for scenic stuff), rather than asking the camera to capture something that it really isn't capable of doing and had perhaps questionable exposure or composition to begin with, and then blaming JPEG for it.

Some people's "art" is what they're able to capture straight off the camera. Here's one from the other night straight off of my D80, no PP whatsoever.

I did shoot that one in RAW too by the way, I did play around with it pretty extensively in CS3 ACR, and could only ever make it as good as the off-the-camera JPEG. When you nail it on-camera, there's really not much you need to do off the camera. If you're trying to turn night into day, or miraculously turn horrible lighting into good lighting then you've got bigger issues than RAW vs JPEG.

Definitive statements like yours on RAW vs JPEG are complete nonsense, and you fail to respect that people have different styles, different methods of PP (or no PP), and that people are all trying to achieve different things. Why don't you tell some of the award winning photojournalists who shoot JPEG because they have zero time to screw around in Photoshop that their photos aren't the best they can be because they didn't shoot in RAW. Or how bout the sports shooters whose "art" is to capture something at a key moment where even a technically "flawed" JPEG captured at the right moment is a far superior image to a technically "more perfect" RAW image captured a moment too late because your buffer had filled and you missed the shot. Some people's art is in what they capture and want to get things right on-camera. That's me. Other people like what I consider to be "messing around" in Photoshop doing a dozen different steps later. Their art is what they can create after the fact. That's not me, but I respect their art form just like I do any other. Just because we all have DSLRs doesn't mean we should all be doing things ONE particular way. Everybody has a unique perspective and approach and aims for different things. Shooting in RAW may or may not make a difference depending on what you're trying to achieve. It rarely has for me, but YMMV since everyone's approach will be different.

 

[Garbz]

Sorry but since when does JPEG capture less dynamic range than RAW? If your camera is that retarded to apply a contrast curve that blows highlights it actually recorded maybe it's time for a new camera, but chances are the article is wrong.

There's more bit depth between the high and low parts, but there is no more dynamic range, and definitely not a few stops more.

I won't get into the whole editing debate only to say, just because you shoot in RAW doesn't mean you need to edit your photos. When you import photos in bridge or lightroom it applies it's default settings just like your camera does when it processes to jpeg.

I do no less work on my computer if I shoot jpeg, I just lose the ability to do some finer editing (colour balance is a life saver).

As for the storage issue. You guys need to go out with a roll of film some day. You may come home with less crap pictures if you're limited to taking 36 in the one outing.

 

[Mav]

Jpegs can be edited, just not to the same extent. You could do better, it was hard to process without knowing what the original scene looked like.

http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/5912/concstonesvd5.jpg

Sorry all, I couldn't figure out how to post the image instead of the link.

WOW! Simply amazing what you can do with a web-sized [size=+1]JPEG![/size] :lmao: :hail:

I love these threads. Somebody always posts a photo that they just couldn't get right and needed to shoot RAW because of, and then someone corrects the little web-sized JPEG. Yet people still say you "can't" fix WB on JPEG. Amazing. The myths will never die.

 

[Mav]

Read it, and I think the most attractive feature for me is white balance correction... So many of my night/indoor shots are ruined because of this. Now I have a reason to use RAW.:thumbup:

You can easily fix indoor/night WB issues with the Photoshop Color Balance tool. Select a white/neutral point and it'll re-map out the colors. Or just adjust the slider until things look right. It's about two or three clicks for me in the DxO software that I used. I've fixed plenty of indoor shots from JPEG with messed up WB, and yes I've printed them big too. They look great.

 

[tirediron]

Mav, you like jpg, and it works for you. That's great. Enjoy.

 

[manaheim]

^^^ +1

It's obviously pointless continuing this, I'll just make a couple final remarks.

1. That corrected image is nowhere near correct. I wanted it to look like the scene looked to my eyes... and that wasn't it... and there is NO way to get it from that JPEG. Trust me.

2. I'd really love to have gotten that shot without the street lights, but that was taken right next to the village center... I can't move the gravestones OR the street lights.

3. Important to know that Nikon D series, in my experience, handles incandescant lights really poorly.

If you can get the shot consistently enough such that its "nailed" and you feel you can make corrections for when you don't such that it makes you happy... cool. As I think I said before, and as the previous poster said... it works for you. That's great.

For all I know you're a hell of a lot better photog than I am with far better control of your equipment... or perhaps your cams handle this better than my D100 did... and my D300.

Who knows.

I find RAW indispensable. You don't.

C'est la vie.