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RAW or Jpeg?????
Raw for commercial PAID shoots. J-peg for online models. Oliver Cole Jul 08 05 11:10 pm Link RAW, because my SD10, only shoots RAW but I still check all my exposure parameters and besides white balance, I also shoot a grey and a black and a color card which I still do with my film cameras as well cuz I'm an anal little punk and I like the ability to use the word proprietary...lol (did I spell it correctly?) Jul 08 05 11:48 pm Link Posted by BlacklistVisual: it would have probably looked just as good if you shot it in JPEG too. What format did you send it to the printers in? Tiff? if so, there is a good chance they converted it to Jpeg before printing anyways. Jul 09 05 04:39 pm Link RAW became an important element for those submitting images for publishing through Tiff conversion. Tiff is the most desired file format as when line screens (4-color separation and printing) are applied they can wreck havoc with jpeg artifacting / compression. This typically won't show in newsprint due to screen size, but the higher the quality (greater the screen size) the more necessary it becomes to utilize the most durable file type, RAW to Tiff. Jul 10 05 12:06 am Link Posted by Brian Diaz: I archive my JPEGs at their highest quality, and always save down or up-sampled images separately so I can tell them apart. I do my initial captures with a custom white balance that gets the image pretty much right where I want it (close enough to fool me, in other words). Also, do you have a curve saved that has profiled you particular camera? There's something that had to be done with each new batch of film, but only has to be done once per camera. I've gone through a total of 3 digital cameras in 3 years; and I've got the profiles for the last 2, yeah. I find it doesn't make a whole lot of difference at that stage, though. If I am making color shifts they're almost always in post-processing. When I go to print an my workflow is that I don't save the file with the profile applied, I just throw it away. Jul 10 05 09:16 am Link RAW - because I suck at getting a good exposure, and to cheap to spend my money on a light meter. Sometimes within the RAW conversion software I might make a 1/3 exposure adjustment or if I was doing just a test shoot but the expression and pose was great on the model but exposure was way off. I can normally still use the image, and just adjust the exposure level (most of the time) Jul 10 05 09:24 am Link Posted by Hartsoe: Try it!! Jul 10 05 09:31 am Link Posted by CThomson: 2 years ago I did a shoot with Arielle Lee and got some stuff I was really happy with, offloaded it from the camera onto my trusty laptop, burned CDs, put the whole lot in my briefcase, checked my photo-gear in the luggage, and headed home on United Airlines. Making the puddle jumper to Chicago they told me I needed to gate-check my briefcase because it was too big for the overhead, so I did. Apparently the green tag fell off in the luggage bay or something because they wouldn't return it to me at Chicago. "Homeland Security says we can't give this to you if it doesn't have a tag on it." "Well it has my passport in it. Open it and you'll see it's mine." "Sir we can't open it; what if you were an FAA inspector trying to see if we'd bend the rules?" "If I were an FAA inspector I'd bend your face, if you lost my (!&!^!^# briefcase, Hmmmmm....?" Upshot: I never saw the briefcase (a Zero Z1) laptop (a Vaio Picturebook) or my CDs again. Jul 10 05 09:40 am Link Posted by Marcus J. Ranum: Okay, that's silly why exactly? :-) Jul 10 05 09:44 am Link Posted by Todd Steinwart: Trusting the postal service to get something from point A to point B as more reliable than hand-carrying it? Jul 10 05 09:48 am Link Oh, one more point: for paid shoots, go ahead and shoot RAW. You might run into a client who is annoyingly into digital photography and have to debate "why didn't you shoot RAW for my incredibly important pictures?" I am not joking, unfortunately. I did a couple of shots for a friend's website and he'd been studying up and had a digital camera and knew just enough to be incredibly annoying.  I wanted to smack him, "I shot a RAW 12-megapixel image so I could tweak it and downsample it into a 200x200 JPEG you !(&!$(&!^$*$ moron." But hey, the customer's always right. mjr. Jul 10 05 09:53 am Link Posted by Marcus J. Ranum: Posted by Todd Steinwart: Trusting the postal service to get something from point A to point B as more reliable than hand-carrying it? Good point. I thought you were disparaging yourself for separating yourself from your backups, which isn't silly at all. Jul 10 05 09:53 am Link Hm, in my experience, CDs are only slightly more reliable than the USPS. But really, what are the chances that the airline will lose your luggage and your briefcase AND the post office loses your package or the CDs fail. Not silly in the slightest. Not if the photos matter to you. Jul 10 05 09:55 am Link Impressing clients is important, if only so they don't think that they can do the same job. Another way is to invent termonology to confuse them. My favorite is the C47 clamp:  Jul 10 05 10:09 am Link Posted by Brian Diaz: Holy crap! You use the old wooden non-archival ones? Don't you know that serious photographers use polypropylene-toluol C47 clamps only?? I had a wooden C47 holding up one of my models, and the glyco-turbinate left stains all over the framis joint and the entire shoot had to be scrapped! As a result, I only shoot JPEGs. Jul 10 05 10:13 am Link RAW. Just my personal preference, but I much prefer having a better file to start with, and having this file to archive and come back to as needed or desired. Most of the time I can accomodate everything I need to archive (all of the RAW files and the initially processed shots) on a single 4.7 GB DVD with room to spare. I'm sure that I don't shoot the volume that many here do, so for me it's worth the little extra I have to spend. I'm also used to spending a little extra time in post processing; it's actually faster than scanning my film negatives. Having played with the RAW + JPEG option, at this point I prefer using one or the other depending on the situation, as opposed to shooting with both, to me it seems like a waste of space on my card. Technical aspects aside, I like the results of my final prints a lot better using RAW, some of this could be attributed to operator error, but it's what works for me. 8} Jul 10 05 10:22 am Link JPEGs? You don't shoot in ISO/IEC IS 10918-1 | ITU-T Recommendation T.81 created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group? Amateur. Jul 10 05 10:24 am Link Posted by Hartsoe: Posted by Eric Muss-Barnes: Ahem - I thought the human eye can't recognize more that 256 greyscales... but millions of colors... Yeah, I have to agree that this is a pretty wild statement. Jul 10 05 10:36 am Link Posted by orinxpress: Like I said earlier, that's what's so great about digital-whatever. Jul 10 05 10:54 am Link Posted by Marcus J. Ranum: yeah, this is one of the few times in digital land where a "all caps" word isn't an abbreviation, it truly means raw, and each manufacturer has their own definition of raw (RAW)..lol..this arguement probably goes more to taste, "I'll take mine medium rare, please", than objectivity. Like marcus said, until you can come up with a truly objective experiment to do a side by side, with no veils or "filters", I guess the output is all that really matters and if the customer, be it you, the photographer, the subject in the picture, the magazine printing it, or whoever, like the image, then that's the way it has to be. I was a full time audio engineer for 10 years and I never got all the ears in the audience to agree that the show was perfect. Hell, I was my own worst critic, and still am. Jul 10 05 02:28 pm Link Always RAW. I am a bit anal about things. I want total control. I don't want to be limited by arbirary options like "sharpness +2". What the hell is "sharpness +2" anyway? How mush sharper is it than "sharpness +1"? RAW gives me complete end-to-end control of the process. Also, except for polarizers and ND's, I do not use filters anymore. That's all done in post-processing. This significantly frees me up during the shooting process. RAW increases flexibility even more. I also find WB control workflow smoother and more consistent when shooting RAW. I bet the same people who dismiss the extra tonal range of 12bit RAW versus 8bit JPEG would not get caught dead using a lowly 24bit scanner instead of a 42bit or higher scanner... Jul 10 05 10:11 pm Link I want my sharpness to go to 11! lol and I agree with Mr. Feinberg about the flexibility Jul 11 05 12:56 am Link I almost hate to breathe new life into this thread, but I was really intruiged by the whole topic so I decided to do a little experimenting and some web coding. So... Please check out: Lossy Jpeg versus Non-lossy perception test It's a little Javascript app I put together that shows you 10 JPEGs and 10 PNGs(lossless) and lets you pick which one is which. I also did a little bit of other lab-work on image quality while I was at it, and offer a few opinions and some possible reasons why things are the way they are. Feedback welcome! I'm shooting tomorrow and thursday and plan to take my tripod and see if I can come up with a similar test to let people see if RAW images really are "sharper" than JPEGs - I need to come up with a good way of getting my RAW samples to approximately match my JPEGS, though. I'm going to shoot a calibration target and try to match them visually but that may not be precise enough. We'll see! mjr. Jul 12 05 08:37 pm Link Hey, that was fun! I got 8/10, but I have to admit that on the first one, the jpg loaded immediately, and the png took a couple seconds, so that skewed the results slightly. Is it possible (or even worth your while) to hide the images until they are completely downloaded? Also, the photos were all resampled. They were resampled equally, so I doubt that really changed anything, but it might be nice to see some 100% crops. I'd say I was sure and right 5 times, unsure but right 3 times, and unsure and wrong twice. One of the problems with a JPG vs. RAW test like this is that I don't care what a photo looks like straight out of the camera; I care about what a photo looks like when I'm done with it. A camera file (much like a negative) is like a first draft of a story; it should not hit the presses until it's been edited. And you just can't edit JPG and RAW files in the same way. So to compare two images like that, you're comparing different editing techniques and software, not the intrinsic properties of the files. Just a thought... Jul 12 05 10:55 pm Link 8/10 also... I could spot most of the jpegs because the artifacting around the high contrast edges makes them look slightly over sharpened. Jul 12 05 11:41 pm Link Sounds like the same debate as negative film versus transparency film. I shot slide film for over 30 years before switching to digital. I now shoot JPEGS. I'm certainly no expert when it comes to digital media, but I do know photography and lighting. I control everything at the time I take a picture, and it comes right out of the camera just the way I want it to look. It's an old habit, just like I had to do with slides. I still use filters and gels to get the white balance I want, control the light ratios so the digital stuff can handle the range (it's just a little more critical than slide film), and shoot completely in manual using a hand held meter for accurate exposure. Since I am already use to working this way, it's easier for me and I don't have to spend days on the computer after each shoot. I shoot every day so I would never have time for the post production. Funny thing is my magazine clients are now asking me to provide the images in JPEG format so they can do their own post production work. Proprietry software (RAW) gives them a headache. This thread asked what do I shoot, and this is just my preference, it's not a "right or wrong" kind of thing. Jul 13 05 02:31 pm Link Yeah, it really isn't "right or wrong", it's totally a matter of preference and workflow. I see it as this: Shooting JPEG- You take the shot, camera acts as the photolab and generates the fimal image for you. Shooting Raw- You take the shot, you act as the photo lab, and you must generate the final image. For people who have the gear and have been in the industry a while, the JPEG workflow probably works best. They are use to doing the work up-front (filters, gels, color-balance, etc.), and it's second nature to them. For people like myself who understand the above workflow but lack the years of experience and/or equipment, the RAW workflow works better. I am totally at home on a computer. I can do in post-processing just about anything an experienced photographer can do in the field and just about as fast. I feel less encumbered during the shoot and handle much of the creative process on the back-end. The one constant is the need for proper lighting and exposure regardless of workflow. For me, RAW is not about having the ability to fix mistakes (I shot slide film prior to digital, which is not forgiving), it's about workflow. That said, you can also do the "RAW workflow" with JPEGS, but I personally feel you do loose some control that way and for me JPEG would not simplify my methods. In the end, most images will end up as JPEG most of the time. It's a great format. The difference is how we go about getting there... Jul 13 05 09:08 pm Link There are a few other differences besides the flexibile color adjustment and exposure safety net. The largest one is sharpening. If you will be doing compositing of the images, you can often use an existing channel as the mask, or use the Blend If sliders based on color channels to make your selection, without any manual painting or use of the pen tool. When there are sharpening artifacts (which can't be turned on in current in-camera JPEG captures), this technique isn't practical--a lot of cleanup will still be required. That will result in extra time spent in postproduction--far more than the conversion of RAW files. The invisible JPEG artifacts can, in rare cases, also affect this, but it's much less common. If you don't do this, it's moot, and goes back to other preferences. Jul 14 05 03:43 am Link |
