Any reason not to shoot in RAW only?

I've yet to meet an event photographer that shoots raw. Can you image having to process 1000 raw images and get them on the web or to the press within hours?
 
admirable said:
I've yet to meet an event photographer that shoots raw. Can you image having to process 1000 raw images and get them on the web or to the press within hours?
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Hence why we've been saying that press photographer's usually shoot JPEG and if they have the RAWs it is for archive.
 
Hotshots said:
I always shoot RAW it retains the most information, Also a good idea to do as little editing to your photos as well and save them to another lossless format like a tiff, If at the end of the day your gonna print them to any good reasonable size you want as much quality as possible.

But Jpegs have there place and there great for low rez applications like websites, snapshots etc.
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Or in fact JPEGs have there place for every application outside of massive prints (and I would guess the amount of people producing massive prints of their photos is under 1%)

Dismissing them as for websites, snapshots etc,. is a mistake.
 
unlike the rest of you, I cannot shoot perfect pictures every time :lol:

Shooting in raw provides much more data to tweek to try and get a better balance , or tweek exposures to recover blown whites, or contrast, white and dark levels etc.

12 bit raw provides 4096 bits of data as apposed to jpegs 8bit ( 256 bits) of lossy data. In the D7000 I also have the option of 14 bits uncompressed data )

as an amateur I need all the data I can get to attempt to get a half decent picture at the end, which I then convert to jpeg.
 
More detailed shadows and highlights, plus being able to effectively dodge and burn in a more natural way working with the raw data means RAW is good for me.
 
I'm not saying that one is better than the other but people have there reasons for choosing which format to shoot pictures, It all depends on what your going to do with them afterwards.
 
As a Sony user, I find I'm starting to shoot jpg more and more these days. Features like auto-HDR, panoramas, and particularly multi-frame noise reduction make it the better choice in certain circumstances.
 
Johnd2000 said:
As a Sony user, I find I'm starting to shoot jpg more and more these days. Features like auto-HDR, panoramas, and particularly multi-frame noise reduction make it the better choice in certain circumstances.
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Good point. It's a shame that often those features are only available as JPEG and that the Raw files which produced them are not saved.

That's a camera function thing though, rather than a JPEG vs Raw argument.
 
Thanks a lot for all the continued comments and discussion, it is very useful.

I'm just having a lot of trouble 'developing' my RAW files in terms of colour. I can get a nice enough picture in terms of lighting but then I ruin it when I try to do the colours and obviously being a RAW file it it very flat in colour.

I think I need more experience with editing colour and I am determined to be able to do it but I think that is the only thing still giving me doubts about RAW
 
What program are you using to process the RAW files?

As long as I choose the correct White Balance, either by using the WB that I set in the camera, choosing a WB preset while processing in Adobe Camera Raw, or using the White Balance Tool in ACR on something neutral in the scene, the colours are pretty accurate. Sometime it just needs a slight boost in saturation, but most times a change in contrast can can boost the colours enough. :shrug:
 
If I use lightroom, i usually have to tweek the contrast to make it look right, but Nikons ViewNX applies the same setting as defined in the camera and they come out alright and usually don't need touching at all.
 
For those people complaining that Lightroom's default settings aren't quite right, leading to 'flat' images - it is possible to change the defaults applied when you open an image.

First load a representative image, with a broad range of exposures from black to white, and adjust the Tone, Presence, Tone Curve, Detail and Camera Calibration settings to produce the sort of image you're after. Then, still in the Develop module, press the 'Alt' key. The bottom-right button will change from 'Reset' to 'Set Default'. Press that button and the values you've just entered will be used when you import images in the future.

Depending on how you've set your preferences you may need to set varying presets for different cameras and/or ISO values. The latter allows you to have different default values for noise reduction at different ISO values - quite nahdy.
 
i did mean to say I have a D7000 profile that I use for default imports to try and get them right.
 
redhed17 said:
What program are you using to process the RAW files?

As long as I choose the correct White Balance, either by using the WB that I set in the camera, choosing a WB preset while processing in Adobe Camera Raw, or using the White Balance Tool in ACR on something neutral in the scene, the colours are pretty accurate. Sometime it just needs a slight boost in saturation, but most times a change in contrast can can boost the colours enough. :shrug:
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I'm using lightroom 4. If I get the picture looking right in terms of exposure and then put the saturation up it still doesn't look like the JPEG that comes out of the camera. I have been using the 'velvia' setting on my X10 for the JPEGs but I thought all that did was boost the saturation anyway.
 
AESamuel said:
I'm using lightroom 4. If I get the picture looking right in terms of exposure and then put the saturation up it still doesn't look like the JPEG that comes out of the camera. I have been using the 'velvia' setting on my X10 for the JPEGs but I thought all that did was boost the saturation anyway.
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I would doubt it is just boosting saturation. It would be applying sharpness, contrast and possibly all sorts of other things to get that effect.
And if you like the effect and don't need to try and recover a badly exposed shot then why not just use the JPEG anyway.
 
ernesto said:
I would doubt it is just boosting saturation. It would be applying sharpness, contrast and possibly all sorts of other things to get that effect.
And if you like the effect and don't need to try and recover a badly exposed shot then why not just use the JPEG anyway.
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I convert to black and white quite often using Nik's Silver Efex pro. When I do that with a JPEG I get odd artifacts in highlights but that doesn't happen with RAW. I also prefer editing RAW in black and white and in colour I prefer the flexability with exposure. It is really annoying me though because I do prefer the look of colour JPEGS.

I know some of you will say that I should just shoot RAW+JPEG but I tried that and it is quite annoying sifting through both formats for the shots I want. It would be much easier if I could learn to edit RAWs properly in colour.
 
wish I had that problem. I can't even use RAW files with my current camera choice as not compatible with my OS. While I like the JPEGs from the camera I would choose raw just because Apples iPhoto handles RAW files so quickly and easily (or at least it has done for all of my previous camera's)
 
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