RAW vs JPEG Post Production

[Hexnut]

If you can tweak jpegs in PS or PSP, why shoot in RAW? I have shot pics on my Rebel XS in jpeg and tweaked them in PSP and they are fairly decent. Is there a huge difference tweaking RAW images PP?

[Frog]

yes......you can get much more out of a raw file.
The image may not look as good at first but once converted will.
There are different programs for working on raw files.
I'm using photoshop elements 6.0. When I edit a raw file I can adjust temperature and tint.
I can then adjust exposure, use 'recovery', (though I'm not sure what that is), adjust fill light, blacks(i use that frequently),brightness & contrast, then mess about with clarity, vibrance and saturation.
Then when I open it in editor, I can make other adjustments there.
You can't do that with a jpeg. You're messing about with a 4 bit channel in jpeg when you have an 8 bit channel when you shoot raw.
There have been several discussion about raw lately and I'm sure someone with more expertise than I will jump in here.

[Hexnut]

Thx Frog. Did a search on this site/forums and there are strong opinions on both sides on whats a better format to shoot in. Since i'm not making a living shooting photos (yet) jpegs are working for the moment. Also the info here suggested that changes to RAW are affected globally while you can selectively change specific areas in JPEG. Granted the discussion was dated 2006 and perhaps the software has improved since then.

[another view]

JPEG isn't better than RAW or vice versa, it's two different tools for different jobs. I don't shoot professionally so I always shoot RAW. My reasoning for this is that I do have the time to work with files since I'm not under a deadline with hundreds of files to handle. If I was, I'd shoot jpg and be really careful to be as close to 100% perfect at the time I shot.

RAW gives you more flexibility for higher quality results after editing. JPEG takes less time but has less options before a drop in image quality will be noticeable.

[Hexnut]

Thx AV...Much appreciated

[jetrim]

What I've come to find in my limited experimentation is that RAW is REALLY helpful when you blow the exposure on difficult lighting shots. Other than that, everything you can do in RAW you can do in photoshop. For me, in most situations (as I don't shoot a lot of sports or other shots that can't be replicated) it's much faster to bracket JPGs than to process RAW files. If I'm shooting something I know is important or can't be done over, I'll shoot in either RAW or TIFF, but for the flowers out front or the cat under the Christmas tree, JPG is absolutely fine.

[jetrim]

When I edit a raw file I can adjust temperature and tint.
I can then adjust exposure, use 'recovery', (though I'm not sure what that is), adjust fill light, blacks(i use that frequently),brightness & contrast, then mess about with clarity, vibrance and saturation.
Then when I open it in editor, I can make other adjustments there.
You can't do that with a jpeg.

This isn't entirely true Frog, when working with JPGs in PSP I can

• adjust temperature and tint
• adjust fill light, blacks
• brightness & contrast
• clarity, vibrance and saturation
• adjust color levels & curves
• perform histogram adjustments

and if I can do all that with 10 year old software, I'm pretty sure you can too

Now, I don't have all the fancy healing brushes and automated functions that Photoshop7 or CS4 have, but the program does everything they do, if you know how to do it manually.

[Cathathome]

My 0.02 cents:

I find that the processing in Raw can speed up the work since the adjustments usually make the image almost ready to go; in PS5, the same corrections will often involve multiple layers and point by point tweaking (color, levels, filters, etc.). Plus, layers require a bit conversion to 8 vs 16 in RAW, so the range is doubly limited.

If I don't want to bother with the RAW workflow, I just convert to TIFF and make basic adjustments using the Enhance tools instead of layers. Because the original RAW file remains intact, I don't worry about messing up and starting over. If you forget to create a copy of the original jpeg (vs working on the original) you won't be able to recover the original data once you hit "save"

The other thing I like about the RAW workflow is that if you have multiple images taken in the same environment/settings, it's very fast to apply the adjustments to the whole batch, whereas in PS5 this processing can be a pain in the unowhat.

@Jetrim: I wonder if you have the advantage of more refined editing tools with even your older version of PSP compared with the options found in Photoshop Elements?

[EOSThree]

The biggest advantage of shooting a working in RAW is that it's a lossless format. Anything you can do on a RAW file you can do on a .jpg file, the difference is that every time you make an adjustment on a .jpg file you lose a bit of the original information in that file, it's not reversible, that information is lost forever.

Do enough "tweaking to a .jpg and it starts to show in the form of halos, blotchy sky, blotchy skin tones, etc, ect. A RAW file is lossless as is a .tif or a .dng. You can tweak away on those files and none of the original information is lost, you can always go back to the original file without consequence. Changing your white balance, sharpening, upping saturation, ect. etc. doesn't destroy information.

RAW also captures information better than a .jpg and details lost in shadow or highlights can be brought out through processing. Single frame HDR is entirely possible with a RAW file, process the file for 3 different EVs and blend them in a program such as photomatix and incredible results are possible.

I have shot RAW since my first days with a digital camera(a Canon S30 point and shoot model that offered RAW), it's just become part of my processing. JPEG is certainly easy and will produce a very good out of camera print providing the shot is pretty much spot on to start with. RAW offers a lot of leeway and a lot of room for creativity.

[Ron Kruger]

Two points:
First about what Jet said. I only have PS Elements (believe it is just 2.0) and I can do all the things to a JPEG that Jet talks about, plus a few he didn't mention.
And to EOS' post about not losing the original in RAW. I save my better JPEG shots on my camera's memory card and simply copy them to My Pictures. From there I take them into PS for processing. I usually don't do much to them, because I concentrate upon getting it right when I press the shutter, and EOS is right about each addition or step degrading the image slightly, but if I go too far or mess up, I can just trash it and copy another original from my camera.

[Cathathome]

Single frame HDR is entirely possible with a RAW file, process the file for 3 different EVs and blend them in a program such as photomatix and incredible results are possible.

Ooh! Where can I learn how to do that? Dish!

Ta,

Cath

[AgingEyes]

I can then adjust exposure, use 'recovery', (though I'm not sure what that is)...

Recovery helps you recover details in highlight areas that may appear to have lost. To do that, adjust recovery and exposure sliders to get the result you want. For cameras such as Fujifilm S5 (king of the dynamic range btw ) and now to a large extent the D3 and D700, you can get back a lot of details in those seemingly blown-out highlight areas.

Here is one example (shot with Fujifilm S5)

Before:



After:


One shot, one file. Still have room to play with.

[Franglais]

Nice example. The D300 can't go quite that far. In Nikon NX2 software you have an exposure adjustment bar that allows you to go -2 to +2 stops. I quite often find I'm making tiny adjustments (less than 1/3 stop)

In the JPG these highlights are empty, blank white, no information, not recoverable. The camera read the 12- or 14-bit values coming out of the sensor, and when it did the conversion to JPG it decided the values were out of range and output them in 8 bits as 255.

The RAW file contains the original values coming in off the sensor. In your RAW editor you effectively say you want to treat these values differently and output them as something lower than 255.

[EOSThree]

Ooh! Where can I learn how to do that? Dish!

Ta,

Cath

Here's a bunch of tutorials on HDR photography. Some are like I describe with three EVs from one RAW file and some use multiple bracketed shots to create the photo. Read up and have fun. HDR is a difficult medium sometimes, you can easily make some quite garish photos if you are not careful. Many on that example page are quite over the top if you ask me.

This is a photo using the blending of 3 EVs from one RAW file from the thread "rescued" in the critique forum.

[Ron Kruger]

Thanks, EOS. I found the tutorial very helpful.

[freygr]

If you can tweak jpegs in PS or PSP, why shoot in RAW? I have shot pics on my Rebel XS in jpeg and tweaked them in PSP and they are fairly decent. Is there a huge difference tweaking RAW images PP?

There is a large difference. JPG is only 8 bit color depth, but RAW is 12,14 or more color bit depth and that is allot more dynamic range, and also the JPG out of the camera has lost picture data but raw has not.

[Frog]

Thankyou for the explanation on 'recovery' AgingEyes.

[Ron Kruger]

With my processing software, I can process RAW in either 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF. When I first went digital and started shooting with covers in mind, I shot RAW images and converted them to 16-bit color TIFF images, but I found out this was drastic overkill for what most magazines require, even for covers, so I quit shooting RAW. The RAW images eat up a 2 MB memory card pretty quickly, and the processed 16-bit TIFF images were about 80 MB each and took up a lot of space in my computer.
I do a lot of shooting, and on some jobs, I sometimes expose a couple of hundred images, go through them and edit two or three times at the time of download, edit them in My Pictures (where I can blow them up full screen and magnify them to determine those with the sharpest image, and edit further when I process them in PS. Out of a couple of hundred, I get 15 or 20 keepers, of which I usually think two or three are exceptional.
So I keep it simple and shoot everything in low-compression JPEG (about 10 MB each).
I will admit, however, that I'm not nearly as knowledgable about digital technology as some of the photographers on this site, so I welcome your comments on my methodology.

[freygr]

With my processing software, I can process RAW in either 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF. When I first went digital and started shooting with covers in mind, I shot RAW images and converted them to 16-bit color TIFF images, but I found out this was drastic overkill for what most magazines require, even for covers, so I quit shooting RAW. The RAW images eat up a 2 MB memory card pretty quickly, and the processed 16-bit TIFF images were about 80 MB each and took up a lot of space in my computer.
I do a lot of shooting, and on some jobs, I sometimes expose a couple of hundred images, go through them and edit two or three times at the time of download, edit them in My Pictures (where I can blow them up full screen and magnify them to determine those with the sharpest image, and edit further when I process them in PS. Out of a couple of hundred, I get 15 or 20 keepers, of which I usually think two or three are exceptional.
So I keep it simple and shoot everything in low-compression JPEG (about 10 MB each).
I will admit, however, that I'm not nearly as knowledgable about digital technology as some of the photographers on this site, so I welcome your comments on my methodology.

Yes RAW takes up more space but who cares, the 4 GIG card holds about 500 photos (RAW + JPG basic). If I need I can always burn the photos on the card to a DVD and only leave the keepers on the computers hard drive. With the 1.5 Tbyte USB hards being under $200.00 storage at this time is cheap.

[Ron Kruger]

Thanks, Frey:
I shoot almost every day. Since June I've shot over 5,000 images, and even the saved images in low-compression JPEGs have accumulated. I've been saving them to CD, and will continue to do that according to subject matter or species. That way I can find and access them quickly for future needs (sort of like a filing system), but I plan to buy an external hard drive to store all my images together. That way I will have at least two backups.
My camera will shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time (of each exposure), which would give me the best of both world (the ease and convience of JPEG and the latitude of RAW), but these really eat a memory card. It has occured to me to buy 4 MB cards and shoot RAW/JPEG, at least of my more important shoots, but I'm still not convinced that for my purposes RAW is necessary. I have to consider the cost and storage issues from a business perspective as well.

[SmartWombat]

I still shoot raw.
Disk space is cheap, 1.5TB for £129 just before Xmas.
Memory cards are cheap, 4G now for the price of 2G before thanksgiving.
I use Lightroom, so I can view and quick adjust images without having to leave the RAW format.

The downside?
I can't just take the memory card and print it on the day.

So I would change to shooting RAW+JPG on those occasions where I may need an instant print.

[freygr]

Thanks, Frey:
I shoot almost every day. Since June I've shot over 5,000 images, and even the saved images in low-compression JPEGs have accumulated. I've been saving them to CD, and will continue to do that according to subject matter or species. That way I can find and access them quickly for future needs (sort of like a filing system), but I plan to buy an external hard drive to store all my images together. That way I will have at least two backups.
My camera will shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time (of each exposure), which would give me the best of both world (the ease and convience of JPEG and the latitude of RAW), but these really eat a memory card. It has occured to me to buy 4 MB cards and shoot RAW/JPEG, at least of my more important shoots, but I'm still not convinced that for my purposes RAW is necessary. I have to consider the cost and storage issues from a business perspective as well.

The problem is the non-keepers, you can just delete them but then a few years later you find a program that can fix some of the non-keepers? The only real archival media has been magnetic media 70 years+ The CD and DVD are more short term backup. I have some CD's that are getting up to 8 years, and last time I pulled than out they were still readable but for how much longer?