raw v Jpeg

[mmcp42]

It's quite a big majority, even I'm surprised. As for the TV option, well they're obviously not that good at the apathy thing!

yeah - they organised a meeting, but no-one turned up!

for me I started in jpeg - I recognised it - wossis raw stuff then innit?
once I read a bit (on here mainly) I gave RAW a try
never looked back - sooooooooooooo much more control

IMHO YMMV caveat emptor yadah yadah yadah

 

[..MD..]

jpeg in the studio

raw everywhere else

DD

as above

md

nice to see a poll used in the right way.lol

 

[bindex]

^^^ pretty much sums it up. If it's under controlled conditions then jpegs fine. If in any doubt at all though I'll shoow raw.

 

[turbotoes]

Always raw for me, I got into the habit of shooting raw early on when I was even more rubbish than I still am, in the hope it would help rectify my mistakes. It has helped me a few times when I've forgotten I had the camera set to manual and so under or over exposed, but to be honest now, it's just habit. I'll continue to shoot raw, just incase one day I take that "killer" shot that needs more help than I could give a jpeg.
Though I still aspire to getting it right in camera, as I can tell the difference (with my PP skills) between a saved shot and a got shot!!

 

[Cobra]

It's posts like this that make me thankful I don't give a stuff about the technical side

Edit: to be clear it's a good post, it just hurts my brain

I basically agree with your sentiments Dod
and must admit to reading it 3 or 4 times to get "a handle" on it though

nice to see a poll used in the right way.lol

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

As above white balance is correctable in camera raw with a jpeg file
( I would assume that other editing programmes will also do this?)

When you work on a jpeg using what ever program, the damage has already been done... you can't get back the information you have thrown away.

You can change the appearance of the pixels you have remaining but only at the expense of losing even more information.

It may seem better... but only because it was bad in the first place.
Jpeg can never be a substitute for raw.

 

[Cobra]

When you work on a jpeg using what ever program, the damage has already been done... you can't get back the information you have thrown away.

Agreed but if it was of no use then why not "throw it away" ?
As stated previously by me and by others in the past
A finished Jpeg file ( image) at around 4/5Mb
is just as good (if not better) as a raw at around 15 Mb
in my eyes

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

Agreed but if it was of no use then why not "throw it away" ?
As stated previously by me and by others in the past
A finished Jpeg file ( image) at around 4/5Mb
is just as good (if not better) as a raw at around 15 Mb
in my eyes

Those that have eyes to see......

If you personally can not see the difference that is fine by me....

However there is both a measurable and visible difference between a jpg and correctly processed Raw file.

There is also the jpg problem of saved artefacts caused by the repeated saving of jpgs.

For this reason I save from raw to tiff (a much larger file even than raw) but that is no problem today, now hard disk memory and dvd's are so cheap..
every picture of mine is saved on two hard disks and one cd or dvd.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

This thread comes at the right time for me. Here's why...

Since the start of 2008 I've shot only raw. I've shot JPEG for many years but for my own work, where I do a lot of exposure blending and post-processing, raw allows me to quickly create different exposure layers to work with, much faster than doing it from an original JPEG. I just like raw, simple as.

However, despite me shooting raw for all of my work shoots (which have been lauded as being the best quality pics our repro guys have seen in the company) they have basically put a blanket ban on the use of raw.

Their reasons are that raw files (along with sidecar .xmp files) take up three time as much space as a JPEG, which I can kind of agree with when we are dealing with upwards of 15,000 shots per month across the company; the process of converting the CYMK for print negates the need for high-quality image capture; and that the printing process for magazines is so poor that it basically ruins the benefits of raw.

I say raw works, full stop, because it allows for much easier post-production, whether doing it in batches o treating each shot individually. However, they've put their foot down, the MD agrees with them and now I have to shoot in JPEG.

I've done a shoot this morning, half in JPEG, half in raw. The JPEGs are good from m D200 but max out at about 320mm wide at 300dpi. Blow these shots up to 450mm for putting across a DPS with bleed) and you're pushing the quality and drop even tighter and you're faced with cruddy quality. Raw on the other hand comes out of my D200 at 550mm wide so no blowing up for DPS use, and the sharpening use in Adobe Raw is miles better than the standard unsharp mask.

The guys at my wrk aren't idiots but it amazes me as to how narow-minded some people can be when it comes to change, espcially in the digital age where change is an accepted part of life. JPEGs are fine for screen use and smaller prints but for me, raw just tops it every time.

Rant over....

I can see their point to some degree.... there is little point in offering high quality originals to the design boys if they are working to low end magazine standards. They probably think over sharpened well saturated stuff is good.

However you could still work in raw and just pass over a saved jpg file to what ever standard they fancied.

You could save your own originals on a portable hard disk.

In any event, saving and working in cmyk is the norm in the print and design world, and someone has to do the conversion, as they mostly use that work space when using quark express.
These days much output is direct to the printing machine cutting out the film setting and separate plate making stage.

 

[PMK]

What about NEF, though?

 

[dalex_257]

Agreed you cannot do non destructive editing on Jpeg but then that's what layers are for.

True but not everybody is using Photoshop. I for once prefer not to leave Lightroom and do all editing there and JPEGs are just very limited in that respect. Of course having PS, I can load JPEG, convert it to 16 bit, do all non-destructive editing with layers and save it as JPEG again without much fuss about quality. But you are still dealing with a lot less information - hence less conventional editing and more PS trickery to get it right.

Example: with JPEG there is a limited level of adjustments you can do to exposure (or parts of it) since a very narrow set of brigntess values to operate with (even if I converted 8bit file to 16bit before editing the set of distinct values still will be 256 in each channel). So to achieve what I can do in RAW by simply dragging the exposure slider without making the image too noisy, I would need to do some tweaking with a layers overlaying original, noise reduced and adjusted exposure images from JPEG to achieve the same thing with JPEG. Too complicated...

As I said previously when the highlights are blown they are blown
whatever file format it is and are not recoverable there has to be some detail there to start with
and I find that ACR will pull them back just as well in either
raw or Jpeg

See my other post for that - it's not the same at all. Although it also depends on a RAW converter to handle that hidden clipped area in RAW file and some are better then others, ACR still will do it better for RAW than for JPEG. As I said - if the highlights really blown (not just gradually go to full white) in JPEG there is nothing to recover. In RAW you will have those precious extra bits to get more information from. Of course i agree that it does not help in all the cases and there will be clipping where even this extra headroom in RAW won't be enough (so the clipping occurs above the max pixel value). But where they clipped inside this RAW headroom area, then they are fully recoverable there but not in JPEG.

 

[Marc]

What about NEF, though?

Isn't NEF just the Nikon raw file?

 

[PMK]

Oh, possibly! carry on...