Can you edit a jpeg file or does it need to be the raw file?

[scottduffy]

I took a few shots of my son a while ago and my wife and i really like them. We were going to have one or two of them printed on canvas but as i know hee haw about lighting/editing i believe the shots could be much better if edited correctly. The problem is that i had uploaded them to my gallery here at TP and also emailed them to myself but it seems they are only in jpeg format and i was wondering if these could be edited or if i would need to search my dying old laptop for the raw files. Anyway here are the two shots. All i did to both was crop and de-saturate the colours in windows photo gallery. Any advice/help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Nikon_Nick]

You 'can' process the jpegs (ACR would probably be the best way), but the image quality will very much depend on how much you do to them. The jpeg is already a compressed file, so its likely that you will start to degrade the image (again depending on how much you do to it).

Personally, id dig out the Raw files.

Cheers

Nick

 

[scottduffy]

Thanks Nick. I will have them somewhere in that old machine. I'll look them out tonight.

 

[swanseamale47]

The short answer is yes you can edit jpegs. The raw file has more information to start with and isn't compressed like the jpeg but you can still get a pretty decent shot with just jpeg. Desaturate is about the easiest but worst way to get a good black and white pic, I don't use windows pic gallery but if you have any photo editing software I suspect it'll do a better job of editing.

 

[scottduffy]

Hi Wayne,

I have Photoshop CS5 and DPP that came with the 50d but i have never used either so took the easy option. I'll have to learn one or both but i can't do anything on that donkey of a laptop as it's too old and crashes when applications use too much memory. I'll get round to it asap. Thanks for your reply.

 

[swanseamale47]

Photoshop is the industry standard, and has several excelent ways of making a black and white conversion, most people have their own favorite way. Theres also a very good plug-in for photoshop (for black and white) Nik silver effx which is pretty popular.