In praise of out-of-camera JPGs

Steve in Oz

Senior Member
I've had a D7200 for about three years, totally love it. I've also done my fair share of RAW post-production.

Over the past few months though, I've been looking more closely at the the OOC JPG images coming out of the camera (mainly for clients who need images turned around in a hurry) - and I never realised how good they are.

I think some of us are too quick to damn the ever-present and ubiquitous JPG. I'm convinced now it's 'horses for courses'. I shoot both RAW and JPG so I have access to either type of file.

I use settings I got from this forum:

Vivid, Sharpening 7, Clarity 2, Contrast 1, Brightness .25, Saturation .75, Hue 0.0.

Anyone else with suggestions for getting good JPGs I'd be happy to hear from.

And before anyone tells me I should be shooting RAW - I do - when time permits!

But when a client brings a laptop and a thumb drive to the location and asks for images for his FB page within half an hour...
 

spb_stan

Senior Member
KR likes 'em too ! But he sets the vivid to max.

Which is the best reason not to read KR

JPG is fine for most work where you can control lighting. It is particularly effective with the Z7 because the EVF is so detailed you can "edit" in the VF so see precisely what you are capturing. I played with it for a week on loaner from the only store in my city that had one in stock with the official release today the 27 of Oct. No wasted or test shots needed, nail exposure, shadows, color every time. JPG is going to be a lot more popular with it. The most important time to use RAW is with mixed light temperatures. If you are overpowering ambient or gel the strobe to ambient, JPG color is not going to need tweaking
 

Classified

Senior Member
I regularly shoot Raw + Basic jpg. The basics are handy for transferring to a phone, and messaging out on the spot. I don't see any reason to shoot Raw + Fine jpg.
 

Steve in Oz

Senior Member
Yeah, and my philosophy is that you should try and have everything right when you press the button. A hangover from the days of film maybe!
 

mikew_RIP

Senior Member
When i shot Nikon i sort of used jpeg, set the camera jpeg settings to what i wanted, shot raw, downloaded into view nx.
This gave me a preview with jpeg settings applied, i could resize and save straight out or if i wanted to edit open the raw in photoshop.
 
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