Shooting Raw

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RON_RIP

Senior Member
Was following a thread on another site where a person was contending that the new cameras are so sophisticated that they produce jpegs so good that there is no need to shoot in raw.

Now I have no doubt that the better cameras produce a damn fine jpeg. That being said I still prefer to shoot only raw. The cameras editing program is being devised by

engineer in Japan or somewhere who is ultimately deciding what the image should look like. For all I know that might have a teeny Japanese fellow inside the camera making editing choices for my images.

No thanks. i prefer to make every decision about the ultimate look of my images. If I screw up, thats on me, but it will be screwed up to my standards, not someone else's.

The beauty of the digital revolution is that it has firmly placed all decisions about a photographer's back in our hands more than ever before and I do not intend to ever relinquish that.

Up the revolution:):triumphant:
 
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Rick M

Senior Member
I'm convinced that folks that make such claims are just against post processing or know little about it and digital photography in general.
 
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Ruidoso Bill

Senior Member
I agree with Rick, lets see, what's easier and less time consuming, learning say Lightroom and Photoshop (and becoming proficient) or settling for less image quality? The answer is simple if you don't know or appreciate the difference.
 
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jrleo33

Senior Member
Myself, I want and need every small bit of data my camera sensor can record. JPEG compression technology relies on throwing data away, and if a JPEG is reopened for further editing, the resulting JPEG will degrade itself. Not so with RAW images, as all the data remains with the original image.
 
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stmv

Senior Member
I use Jpegs for about 60% of the edits,, and then well,, RAW for the rest,, often because the temperature or light is just captured right in the JPEG
version. If I really like a JPEG version, I'll go back and try to do better with the RAW version,, adding RAW to the file name to keep track of the original
source.

That is the beauty of hard memory cards, along with fast enough computers, one can shoot and keep both versions.
 
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everprentice

Senior Member
RAW files are not images but are proprietary sensor data files while JPEG is an image format that follows a certain standard. The latter therefore is a no-fills, for lack of a better term, stripped down format. There are many image formats available like GIF, PNG, WEBM, etc., but JPEG is the most common standard of image files that is used across a wide variety of equipment-cameras to media players.

I compare it to cooking a pie. RAW files are the recipes and the pie is the JPEG. No matter how good a JPEG is, it doesn't contain the information the RAW files have.

My two cents worth.
 
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