dieselnutjob
Senior Member
I bought my D750 a couple of weeks ago, and a pair of fast 128Gb SD cards.
For the first time I started to mess with raw NEF format. I followed the advice to save to both cars in NEF+JPEG(Fine).
Last Sunday we went to Whipsnade zoo and had a play, and that evening had a look at the results.
I was rather surprised with what I saw.
For some of the photos (it seems to be the ones with less colour) I couldn't immediately see much difference.
However one shot in particular that had trees which had different coloured leaves the difference was quite striking.
I had deliberately underexposed the shot. It was getting late in the day and I got the feeling that the camera was trying to brighten up the image to make it not what it was, and there was a corner of nice blue sky that a nicer blue if I underexposed.
The JPEG version of the file seemed to have weaker colours, whilst those of the NEF image seemed "richer". This is without altering the image in any way. I am talking about a JPEG and NEF file of the same shot straight from the SD card.
Next I thought I would try and save the image on my computer as a JPEG from the raw NEF file to see if I could make a better job of it than Nikon. I was shocked to find that I could!
Firstly I opened the raw NEF image using RawTherapee and saved it to JPEG. The result was much that same as that that the D750 had produced.
Then I noticed the save dialogue had a "JPEG quality" slider and that it defaulted to 95%.
By sliding that to 100% the jpeg file was slightly bigger than the one that the Nikon had produced, and the colours were richer again.
So just when I thought I had been really clever, there is now another spanner in the works.
I am looking at the photos again just to make sure that I'm not talking rubbish, and now I can't see much difference! It's very weird. But now I think about it I'm pretty sure that it was a different laptop. Right now I am on a Lenovo T420s running Windows 10, but when I think about it when I noticed these differences I am pretty sure I was using an old Macbook Pro 17 running High Sierra.
So is it true that the D750 doesn't save JPEGs in as rich a way as a JPEG could be?
Is there a setting in the D750 to have JPEGs saved with 100% quality?
My understanding of raw files is that allows more processing and recovery, but for a given unprocessed file does the JPEG compression spoil the image even if you have no intention of processing it?
Do you need a Mac to be able to see the difference?
I'm not trying to start a JPEG vs RAW war, it's just that sometimes you need a JPEG, for example to post on a website. It would be nice if the JPEG out of the camera could be as nice as it can be and I'm a bit surprised with such an expensive camera that it isn't. Maybe I haven't set it up right....
For the first time I started to mess with raw NEF format. I followed the advice to save to both cars in NEF+JPEG(Fine).
Last Sunday we went to Whipsnade zoo and had a play, and that evening had a look at the results.
I was rather surprised with what I saw.
For some of the photos (it seems to be the ones with less colour) I couldn't immediately see much difference.
However one shot in particular that had trees which had different coloured leaves the difference was quite striking.
I had deliberately underexposed the shot. It was getting late in the day and I got the feeling that the camera was trying to brighten up the image to make it not what it was, and there was a corner of nice blue sky that a nicer blue if I underexposed.
The JPEG version of the file seemed to have weaker colours, whilst those of the NEF image seemed "richer". This is without altering the image in any way. I am talking about a JPEG and NEF file of the same shot straight from the SD card.
Next I thought I would try and save the image on my computer as a JPEG from the raw NEF file to see if I could make a better job of it than Nikon. I was shocked to find that I could!
Firstly I opened the raw NEF image using RawTherapee and saved it to JPEG. The result was much that same as that that the D750 had produced.
Then I noticed the save dialogue had a "JPEG quality" slider and that it defaulted to 95%.
By sliding that to 100% the jpeg file was slightly bigger than the one that the Nikon had produced, and the colours were richer again.
So just when I thought I had been really clever, there is now another spanner in the works.
I am looking at the photos again just to make sure that I'm not talking rubbish, and now I can't see much difference! It's very weird. But now I think about it I'm pretty sure that it was a different laptop. Right now I am on a Lenovo T420s running Windows 10, but when I think about it when I noticed these differences I am pretty sure I was using an old Macbook Pro 17 running High Sierra.
So is it true that the D750 doesn't save JPEGs in as rich a way as a JPEG could be?
Is there a setting in the D750 to have JPEGs saved with 100% quality?
My understanding of raw files is that allows more processing and recovery, but for a given unprocessed file does the JPEG compression spoil the image even if you have no intention of processing it?
Do you need a Mac to be able to see the difference?
I'm not trying to start a JPEG vs RAW war, it's just that sometimes you need a JPEG, for example to post on a website. It would be nice if the JPEG out of the camera could be as nice as it can be and I'm a bit surprised with such an expensive camera that it isn't. Maybe I haven't set it up right....