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Raw -v- JPEG
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Ok, go easy on me. I am not sure what the differece between RAW and JPEG is. I have studied computers in college and I have read the specs for what JPEG is and I have a camera that can shoot both RAW and JPEG (I have probably not taken advatage of this), but I am not sure what the difference is. If someone could break it down in a stupidly simplistic way for me :oops: :oops: :oops: sorry, I would be very greatful.
Its gonna take me a while to get any kinda cred around here now. :roll: . Ah well.
I’m not an expert. But here is my take (in a very simple way)
Shooting in jpeg mode is basically the camera has taken a raw shot and run a macro/action on it to up saturation, sharpen, set white balance, set contrast, played with curves etc etc. At the end it gives you a jpeg file. What exactly is in this macro/action is chosen by you when you select from the available macros in the camera menus eg “portrait”, “landscape”,”Normal”,”Vivid”,”more vivid”, “black and white”, “white balance” etc etc
Shotting in raw is basically that the camera does not run any macro and leaves the image exactly as is from the sensor (which is generally boring). This means that you have to run the macro/action/post processing your self in photoshop or what ever tool/raw converter you use for post processing (the advantage of this is that you have control on what actions/macros are run. Basically you can try different things etc and fine tune)
Basically if you want to post process your images shoot raw, if you don’t want to do much or no post processing shoot jpeg
If your really serious about photography shoot raw as its basically your negative/tranny
M
Martin pretty well answers your question.
I’d say one more thing – the macro that the camera runs
dumps info, as can be seen from the respective file sizes for
RAW and JPG. Once you have the JPG you will never recover
all the info that the sensor originally captured. With the RAW file
you can still get back bits and pieces of data that would be binned
in the making of the JPG.If you’re not careful JPGs will degrade at each open and close. You’ll start to see artifacts (little blobs) if you zoom in. Shoot RAW and you’ll always have a “clean” negative to refer back to. Who knows what you want to do with the photos down the road … blow ’em up large, sell ’em as stock, and so on. Can’t do that if you’ve resaved your JPGs tons of times. I learned the hard way… used to shoot JPG to “save room” on my memory cards. Careless resaving and now have visible artifacts.
Cath.
Cath makes a very important point above re artifacts. I learned that only recently when trying to do now in PS that I couldn’t do a few months back but ended up with a spotty image. If you can cope with the size of the files RAW is the way.
Alan.
Martin wrote:
Shooting in jpeg mode is basically the camera has taken a raw shot and run a macro/action on it to up saturation, sharpen, set white balance, set contrast, played with curves etc etc. At the end it gives you a jpeg file. What exactly is in this macro/action is chosen by you when you select from the available macros in the camera menus eg “portrait”, “landscape”,”Normal”,”Vivid”,”more vivid”, “black and white”, “white balance” etc etc
Perhaps the most important difference between JPEG and RAW format shotting is the compression that is applied to JPEGs.
When you capture in RAW the data recorded by the memory device is as captured by the sensor, hence at post capture processing you retain all options for work thereafter.
JPEG on the other hand is a compression of the RAW data to save disc space, if you go deeper in the the subject you will find at the capture-JPEG algorithm records a ‘curve’ for the image around which all other data is compressed, hence more space on the memory device for images. The biggest challenge with JPEG is that data is discarded during the JPEG compression that can never every be recovered from the image. This also makes JPEG saves ‘lossy’ which causes the file structure to further compress / lose data every time you edit/save an image.
Many of us work in RAW converted to TIFF which is a loss less conversion where working on the TIFF file sees edit/save cycle of TIFF files only change the pixels that are edited.
My advice is that if you have RAW capability use RAW for all the ‘serious want to keep images’, and images that you will treasure. For quick snapshots (say ebay items, record shots to convey a concept to a remote person) JPEG will do all that you want.
Hope this helps and if anyone disagrees / has a different understanding of JPEG compression please shout.
Martin wrote:
Shooting in jpeg mode is basically the camera has taken a raw shot and run a macro/action on it to up saturation, sharpen, set white balance, set contrast, played with curves etc etc. At the end it gives you a jpeg file. What exactly is in this macro/action is chosen by you when you select from the available macros in the camera menus eg “portrait”, “landscape”,”Normal”,”Vivid”,”more vivid”, “black and white”, “white balance” etc etc
Perhaps the most important difference between JPEG and RAW format shotting is the compression that is applied to JPEGs.
When you capture in RAW the data recorded by the memory device is as captured by the sensor, hence at post capture processing you retain all options for work thereafter.
JPEG on the other hand is a compression of the RAW data to save disc space, if you go deeper in the the subject you will find at the capture-JPEG algorithm records a ‘curve’ for the image around which all other data is compressed, hence more space on the memory device for images. The biggest challenge with JPEG is that data is discarded during the JPEG compression that can never every be recovered from the image. This also makes JPEG saves ‘lossy’ which causes the file structure to further compress / lose data every time you edit/save an image.
Many of us work in RAW converted to TIFF which is a loss less conversion where working on the TIFF file sees edit/save cycle of TIFF files only change the pixels that are edited.
My advice is that if you have RAW capability use RAW for all the ‘serious want to keep images’, and images that you will treasure. For quick snapshots (say ebay items, record shots to convey a concept to a remote person) JPEG will do all that you want.
Hope this helps and if anyone disagrees / has a different understanding of JPEG compression please shout.
Martin wrote:
Shooting in jpeg mode is basically the camera has taken a raw shot and run a macro/action on it to up saturation, sharpen, set white balance, set contrast, played with curves etc etc. At the end it gives you a jpeg file. What exactly is in this macro/action is chosen by you when you select from the available macros in the camera menus eg “portrait”, “landscape”,”Normal”,”Vivid”,”more vivid”, “black and white”, “white balance” etc etc
Perhaps the most important difference between JPEG and RAW format shotting is the compression that is applied to JPEGs.
When you capture in RAW the data recorded by the memory device is as captured by the sensor, hence at post capture processing you retain all options for work thereafter.
JPEG on the other hand is a compression of the RAW data to save disc space, if you go deeper in the the subject you will find at the capture-JPEG algorithm records a ‘curve’ for the image around which all other data is compressed, hence more space on the memory device for images. The biggest challenge with JPEG is that data is discarded during the JPEG compression that can never every be recovered from the image. This also makes JPEG saves ‘lossy’ which causes the file structure to further compress / lose data every time you edit/save an image.
Many of us work in RAW converted to TIFF which is a loss less conversion where working on the TIFF file sees edit/save cycle of TIFF files only change the pixels that are edited.
My advice is that if you have RAW capability use RAW for all the ‘serious want to keep images’, and images that you will treasure. For quick snapshots (say ebay items, record shots to convey a concept to a remote person) JPEG will do all that you want.
Hope this helps and if anyone disagrees / has a different understanding of JPEG compression please shout.
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