- This topic is empty.
Do you shoot Raw or Jpeg?
-
its slightly lossy mostly in the form of lowered resolution in the highlights
Jay King wrote:
JPEG…
because I dont have the time to convert from RAW!
I would prefer to shoot RAW and have a bit more fun with it, but for the above reason just can’t do it!
Interesting! The reason I stopped shooting JPEG in the first place was because it was taking me longer than if I were shooting RAW! Batch processing a large job is far more efficient and gives you a much higher quality that attempting to do the same thing with JPEG files.
All the talk from the pros this year at Focus was about taking back control of photography and having more efficient workflows. The only way to do this is to shoot RAW. Much of the discussion I heard at Focus echoed my own thinking on this subject, so I was relieved to hear it (knowing that I wasn’t just piddling against the wind!) Digital cameras of all sorts now enable almost anyone to take a reasonably good picture. So we try to do something with our image to make it a little different and in the end we spend more time using Photoshop than we do taking photographs. We are no longer photographers but have become slaves to our computers!
Personally, I’d much rather be out taking photographs than spending time with Photoshop. This becomes even more important when you are a professional because time is money. If you’re being paid an hourly rate for photography and then you spend more time retouching the image afterwards, you can’t charge for that time, so you lose money. A client isn’t interested in the fact that you didn’t take the time to get the shot right in the first place. For example, moving a stray hair from a portrait before you take the shot takes a fraction of a second, but if you have to do the same thing in Photoshop it could take several seconds or even minutes, depending on the complexity. Supposing you have to do that for ten or twenty images – seconds and minutes become hours! Which would you rather do? Care taken at the image capture stage along with RAW capture, frees me from spending endless hours in front of the monitor!
Some people think that RAW is for sloppy photographers and JPEG is for those who get everything right in the camera. Yes, you do have to get everything (especially white balance and exposure) correct when shooting JPEG, but to get the very best out of RAW one should dtrive to get everything right there too. RAW is no excuse for poor technique but it does give you latitude that you don’t have with JPEG’s, but there are other important benefits too. Most DSLR’s generate 12-bit RAW files, which gives you 4,096 shades of grey. A JPEG file is an 8-bit file, which is only 256 shades of grey. Straight away it should be obvious why you shouldn’t mess too much with JPEG file. It’s not a good idea to mess too much with a RAW file either, but it should be obvious why you have the extra latitude to do so.
Sharpenning is another aspect to consider. If you must shoot JPEG, then swith sharpening off completely. Likewise with contrast (set it to it’s lowest). Once the camera has applied sharpenning and contrast to the image it’s almost impossible to reverse the damage done.
There’s so much more to be said in favour of RAW, some of which has already been stated here. There may well be times when JPEG is more suited than RAW, but I’ve yet to come across such an occassion.
I have to shoot in JPEG, my hard drive is full and I’m too disorganised to go get an external harddrive, this weekend, I promise.
//Cian
With me it depends… if and when colours are critical (whiet balance etc) I shoot Raw. Also all my landscape stuff is Raw. Basically whenever my camera is on a tripod its in RAW. I would say my Raw to Jpeg ration is about 70:30 in the Raw’s favor. For whatever reason I nearly always shoot my wildlife stuff in Jpeg.
Richie
Just bought a 500GB external drive to come with the amount of raw I take…
Tim
jb7 wrote:
Is there a reason why people are printing from jpeg?
At home I print from Tiff. If I want a print from my local shop then I need to give them a JPEG. If I’m uploading, I’d rather upload a couple of MB of JPEG rather than 40+MB of TIFF.
For me, it’s RAW almost exclusively, unless in the rare circumstances where I need to shoot in continuous mode (my ageing 300D gets to 3 raws before the buffer tanks)
jb7 wrote:
Is there a reason why people are printing from jpeg?
All, or almost all, current printers won’t benefit from the extra bit depth. A top quality JPEG should give fine results
jb7 wrote:
Is there a reason why people are printing from jpeg?
Is there a reason people shouldn’t print from jpeg? I thought it was the standard for getting prints done in labs, is there a better way?
Raw for everything!! What Tim said too :)
I shoot raw. I switched from Rawshooter to Bibble, recently… Rawshooter kept auto-correcting my images WAY too dark! So I said nuts to that, and switched over to Bibble. Not quite as zippy for processing, but at least it gets the colours right.
John Griffin wrote:
jb7 wrote:
Is there a reason why people are printing from jpeg?
Is there a reason people shouldn’t print from jpeg? I thought it was the standard for getting prints done in labs, is there a better way?
Raw for everything!! What Tim said too :)
Well, even with the highest quality jpeg, you’re still throwing away some data. If you want the absolute best possible results, go with a lossless format (ie tiff). But for most shots, *I* would at least be hard pressed to see the difference.
I always save a finished image as a TIFF but when i go to print that image, i take a jpeg from it to send to the printers, never actually asked them if they could do TIFF’s, i just assumed the file size was too big for them and that there wasn’t any difference in the quality of the print as the file had only been opened a couple of times with a minimum of fatigue or loss.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
