RAW vs JPEG
- Thread starter paul04
- Start date
BackdoorArts
Senior Member
I hear this so often, but here's the thing I don't quite get about it - if you're shooting something as important as a wedding wouldn't you want the ability to fix something if something doesn't come out "right" in the camera? And if you're exposing everything correctly, couldn't you simply apply a custom camera profile set up to get all you WB and lighting nailed either on import or in one fell swoop afterward? Yes, your file sizes are significantly larger, but other than import time I just don't see the risk/reward benefit lining up on the JPEG side. But that's just me.
It takes practice, but once you get used to it you don't really see the difference at all. My team takes beautiful photos that you'd never know were shot in JPEG. It blew me away when I first started shooting with them. It is a rough learning curve at first, but getting your WB and exposure right in the camera makes it a lot quicker and easier to go through and batch edit later. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter whether you are shooting RAW or JPEG, as long as the end product comes out great. One quote I heard recently was "if you take longer than two second to edit a photo, you're losing money" and that really changed my way of thinking. Granted, this really only applies to heavy workload professional stuff because I love spending an hour processing a fun RAW file just as much as the next enthusiast. I'd rather take a picture and get it right on the spot versus saying "oh I'll fix it later" or "I can fix that WB in post".
The reward/benefit from getting it right on the JPEG side is that you become more intuitive to your surroundings without having an easy way to correct it later. I can walk into a hallway and be like "oh this white balance looks like B6" or something and then I know it'll be spot on later. Also, when you're doing a preview slide show at the reception, you can just load your SD/CF card into the TV and hit PLAY because all of the photos from the ceremony are already perfectly shot in the camera and ready to be displayed without having to load them into LR and then process them and export them back out. Timing is key in that specific circumstance.
Like I said before, I only shoot JPEG for weddings/sports where I'm taking a large number of images and I want them to be right in the camera so I can quickly export them and show the images on the spot to parents of sports players or wedding guests. I've shot a few events for another company where they give you SD/CF cards and then take them at the end of the event so I don't get to touch them at all. I make sure everything is good in the camera and then they dont have to spend much time editing after the event. It's a personal preference thing, and 90% of the people on here will always be able to shoot RAW in every instance and it'll be fine. I still shoot RAW when I'm out for fun doing landscapes or wildlife or people or whatever because I enjoy the post processing side even though I already get it right in camera most of the time. It's fun to go that extra mile tweaking a RAW to make it look jaw-dropping. But when your studio is shooting 210 weddings for 2015, it's in everyone's best interest to be as streamlined as possible with your work while still keeping a high quality.
Summary: I shoot JPEG for weddings/sports, and RAW for fun and for everything else. There's really no downside to shooting RAW as a hobbyist, or even as a working professional, but if you can nail a shot perfectly in the camera it just makes your life easier.
There might be little visual difference but RAW vs JPEG is akin to painting on canvas or painting on toilet paper.
When the paint is hardened, you don't really see what material was used and it can look as pretty on both. But once you want to do more than look at it, it becomes obvious why canvas is preferred.
Even the original JPEG that rolls out of the cam has compression artifacts. It's only a pixel here and there and barely noticeable but nevertheless. Once you edit and save the file, you'll introduce more artefacts. If you have to load it into another program to add watermarks or do editing the RAW editor lacks, you'll again introduce artifacts.
Then there's the problem of hard-drive deterioration. All our drives age and it'll result into an inevitable corruption of all our files. JPEG is especially vulnerable because of its "key" which results into worse corruption than TiFF. That's why I save everything as uncompressed TiFF files.
JPEG is toilet paper; you can't use it without staining.
When the paint is hardened, you don't really see what material was used and it can look as pretty on both. But once you want to do more than look at it, it becomes obvious why canvas is preferred.
Even the original JPEG that rolls out of the cam has compression artifacts. It's only a pixel here and there and barely noticeable but nevertheless. Once you edit and save the file, you'll introduce more artefacts. If you have to load it into another program to add watermarks or do editing the RAW editor lacks, you'll again introduce artifacts.
Then there's the problem of hard-drive deterioration. All our drives age and it'll result into an inevitable corruption of all our files. JPEG is especially vulnerable because of its "key" which results into worse corruption than TiFF. That's why I save everything as uncompressed TiFF files.
JPEG is toilet paper; you can't use it without staining.
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If that's the case, this is some impressive toilet paper. To each his own I guess.
AZS PHOTO BOX | Nicole & Jerry "Grand Cascades"
I mentioned that the problem isn't the visual aspect of JPEG but the durability. It's a format not designed for optimal quality but to save space and that comes at a heavy price.
Most of us are investing loads of money to maximize quality; better cam, better lenses, better editors. Then why use a format that is subpar? It's illogical.
A 6*4k JPEG is about 1.8-3Mb, a 6*4k uncompressed TiFF close to 140Mb. That information loss starts to surface the moment we have to manipulate the file. There's so much loss lifting shadows or manipulating highlights is close to impossible.
In the end we all save to JPEG to show the shots online. But it's not as if we prefer the format. It's that we have no other choice. The moment they allow a better format, I'll never use JPEG again.
But to each their own.
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Horoscope Fish
Senior Member
A hamburger, all by itself, looks pretty good when you're hungry. Eat it and your hunger stops. It's even a little tasty. Compare it a well seasoned, perfectly prepared and plated filet mignon though and the burger starts to pale. So sure, the burger gets the job done, but the filet goes way beyond that. IMO, there's a difference between, "getting the job done" and, "doing the job right". JPG's get the job done, no question about that; RAW files, though, it seems to me, go way beyond producing a simply acceptable product.
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