That's your opinion. I'm a serious hobbyist but i don't find myself needing to sqeeze every single juice from the sensor. And I think there are many out there just like me. I just ensure my exposure and technique are right couple with pp when needed.
Proper exposure is no substitute for shooting RAW. Given equal exposures, a RAW frame will allow you to preserve more highlights and see further into shadows than you could do by shooting JPG.
On the other hand I have personally met JPEG shooters who have given me this argument, but having seen their images the bride's dress is a white out and they don't even care! If you are a hobbyist, and shooting JPEGs saves you some time and money that's fine. But a wedding is a one off and it seems obvious to me that one should have as many 'safety nets' as possible if that means that the images will be better for the client.
My take on this is that I paid a lot of hard-earned cash for my gear, and I would like to have all the data it's capable of producing, as opposed to watching an 8-bit JPEG come out the back. If I have an $1800 body/14-bit sensor and a $1000 lens and I could have recovered the highlight details on the white dress if it had been shot in raw but I can't because they already got baked out of the JPEG, well, I feel I'm not getting the most use of what I paid good money for, that a portion of that $2800 worth of data, that could have made a difference, got left on the cutting room floor inside the camera.
This is not meant to say that JPEG shooters are wasting their equipment. If you're getting the exposures you want, then great, you're saving tons of storage, don't shoot raw. But not everyone shoots where the subject is not moving and the camera can be locked down on a tripod at ISO 100 and you can spend 5 minutes working out the perfect exposure and white balance settings in camera. Raw's great to rescue images that were a little off because of the rapid-reaction shooting conditions in changing light like a wedding.
I don't care how much more info RAW has when you compare the bits in a chart. I don't care how the jpg vs RAW look at 100%. I cannot see a perceived difference when the pictures are viewed as intended, not blown up on a computer screen.
I do pj work and I shoot jpg. Most pj's I know shoot jpg. I don't even shoot at the highest quality jpg setting. I just cannot tell a difference. If I were commissioned for billboard or a family wanted a huge phot to hang over the mantle, then I would shoot RAW. If a photograph is good, it is good regardless of format it was shot in. I try to get the photograph as close to perfect in camera and I can do all the editing I need on jpg files. Save the original and edit on the copy. I try to spend as little time editing as possible. Shooting jpg, getting right in the camera, and doing basic toning is all I want to do.
I am not against shooting RAW, I just don't see the benefits unless I know ahead of time the specific purpose and its needed for the job. Otherwise, I shoot jpg 99% of the time, and that includes submissions to publications. If I get that one in a million shot of bigfoot or a UFO, it will not really matter what format it was shot in. The photo of the airplane in the Hudson Rover that got published around the world was taken with an iphone.
Proper exposure is no substitute for shooting RAW. Given equal exposures, a RAW frame will allow you to preserve more highlights and see further into shadows than you could do by shooting JPG.
Sorry, I disagree. More correct would be proper exposure is all about technique and experience. Shooting RAW is no substitute for circumverting technique.
You don’t need to convince me. I have experimented with RAW and know its benefit. It does serve its purpose under certain uncontrollable condition. But in a right exposure (within the histogram), you will deem to see similar thing you have in RAW, no extra bonus of highlights or shadows as you alleged. Not from our normal screen size. If there were, it could be beyond 200% to see the minute difference. The data could be there, whether our naked eye can perceive is frequently ignore.
So whats the correct technique for making the camera record the additional stop + of DR to a jpg? Or for getting a 14bit JPG? I guess I missed that menu option (never did like canons menus).
My modus operanti is to compose a picture in the best possible way I can without excessive clipping and capturing the moment which is far more important issues to me. And yes, I do use pp a lot. My technique (rather the product of my technique) are reflected in my site. A picture paints a thousand words.
If you care to read my other posts in this thread carefully, I’m not against people using RAW, neither did I convince jpeg is the way to go. I’ve done RAW and I know what is RAW. Pse read again.
I’m a serious hobbyist and I do care very much about how my final image looks. I do not make money out of it. I have my full time job and photography is just my passion. I’m not interested in the overwhelming of bits, stops, charts, graphs, or what’s not. I’m not interested in organizing the huge file, transferring, archiving and throwing away good money to buy disc (yeah I know its cheap). Jpeg serve me well 98% of the time for my intended purpose. So there is no necessity for me just to take RAW in search of the shadows, highlights or DR for that elusive 2, 3 or 5%. That's what I encountered.
By all means shoot jpg, but dont trash people shooting raw.
On the contrary, there was hard talk calling “insane” for not taking RAW. These are the people that blows my mind. I’d be glad if you can point out to me where have I gone trashing people and I will stand corrected.
..there was hard talk calling “insane” for not taking RAW. These are the people that blows my mind. I’d be glad if you can point out to me where have I gone trashing people and I will stand corrected.
What I actually said was that a "modern PRO would be insane NOT TO BE ABLE to shoot Raw". This does NOT mean he or she should always shoot RAW. When you read my posts carefully you will see that I, like most people, see that RAW and JPEG both have a role to play. I am sorry to use the word "insane" because it has offended you and clouded my message; perhaps "bizarre", "surprising", "unusual" would have been better choices.
Shooting RAW is not simply a matter of changing the settings on the camera - as you say elsewhere. A RAW photo almost always needs post processing. So shooting RAW is NOT a good advice for an amateur who does not invest the time in learning to do post. Being ABLE TO shoot RAW is good advice for a PRO because he or she can squeeze a bit more from the image when conditions call for it.
I hope this takes the emotional steam out of our exchanges which threaten to spoil an otherwise excellent thread.
Anyone who thinks that you have to shoot raw to get great results should take the time to look at the wonderful work davev has posted on Dgrin over the years. But most of us understand that the photographer is more important than the gear or the processing.
That said, I would like to emphasize a point colourbox made, oh, about 300 posts ago. While you may not see much difference in your results today, both hardware and software are going to continue improving exponentially for the foreseeable future. Most of the output devices (screens and printers) in use today are 8 bits per channel (some screens are less), and do not even render the full gamut of color that an 8-bit JPG can encode. I think this is the primary reason it's sometimes hard to distinguish the difference that raw processing can make. Think of a stereo system with lousy speakers and ask yourself whether it makes sense to add a top-of-the-line amplifier--the sound is still going to be lousy.
But surely that's going to change over time. I haven't the slightest doubt that output devices will be 16 or more bits in the not-too-distant future. Processing software will likewise become more powerful. At that point, it may be a terrible loss if your old pics are only available in 8 bits, especially if they were 12 or 14 or 16 bits while on the sensor. To return to the stereo example, it would be like only buying worn, dusty, scratchy LPs because your speakers are lousy anyway. When you finally acquire good speakers, you will be stuck with worn and scratchy sound, only you will get to hear the noise in excruciating detail.
Now, none of that may matter in some cases. Probably most of the PJ work that is destined for low-quality newspaper reproduction will never be looked at again, and certainly not reprocessed. Speed is of the essence and if your technique is up to par, you can get perfectly good, salable JPGs right out of the camera. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
On the other hand, most everyone keeps way more pictures archived than they are ever likely to need, because, well, ya never know. To me, if something is worth keeping it only makes sense to keep it in a format that offers the greatest future potential. So I shoot exclusively in raw and save the raw files along with the processed results. For me, the processing time difference is trivial and disk space seems to be approaching free, so I have little to lose.
There's a lot being said about the extra DR that raw gives you.
Ziggy posted a chart showing that you lose more of the dark shades when shooting jpg. (at least thats what I think it meant)
So even if you shot raw, did all the work to bring out that DR, don't you still convert it to a jpg to send it to a printer?
Doesn't that shot become an 8 bit file?
One last question for richy, a 30 x 40 bridal shot?
I guess the people I know are a bit less into themselves.
The largest wedding shot I've seen in friends homes are 8 x 10.
There's a lot being said about the extra DR that raw gives you.
Ziggy posted a chart showing that you lose more of the dark shades when shooting jpg. (at least thats what I think it meant)
So even if you shot raw, did all the work to bring out that DR, don't you still convert it to a jpg to send it to a printer?
Doesn't that shot become an 8 bit file?
...
Having extra data in the shadow regions helps if you want to retrieve the detail in the shadows.
Let's all agree that 8 bit JPG is the most common "delivery" format for images (which it is). If you shoot RAW at 12 or 14 bits of information (which all modern dSLRs do during image capture) it allows post processing of any region of the extended dynamic range into the 8 bits required for JPG, but "you", the person using the image processor software, get to decide how those tones are distributed.
Let's say that, for the sake of argument, a camera captures 14 bits of information. Let's represent that data with simple integers:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Now let's represent the 8 bit data of JPG with simple integers:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
When you shoot to JPG in the camera you are trusting the camera to know how you want that extended 14 bit data interpreted into the 8 bit data. If you use the default in-camera processing to JPG it generally just chooses the central portion of 14 bit data and copies it to 8 bits, kind of like:
4=1
5=2
6=3
7=4
8=5
9=6
10=7
11=8
Since the deep shadows are in bits 1, 2 and 3 of the RAW data, that data has been discarded (in this simplified scenario). Likewise for the highlights.
In reality, the situation is not quite this harsh because the camera's image processor uses a non-linear conversion, but it's still true that if you start with more data you have more data to process with and "you" get to decide how to process the data. If you process from RAW files, "you" get to decide what tones deserve to be preserved into the 8 bit output and "you" get to decide how the tones are distributed. It is this level of precision that, I think, helps to define the image tonality.
But surely that's going to change over time. I haven't the slightest doubt that output devices will be 16 or more bits in the not-too-distant future. Processing software will likewise become more powerful. At that point, it may be a terrible loss if your old pics are only available in 8 bits, especially if they were 12 or 14 or 16 bits while on the sensor. To return to the stereo example, it would be like only buying worn, dusty, scratchy LPs because your speakers are lousy anyway. When you finally acquire good speakers, you will be stuck with worn and scratchy sound, only you will get to hear the noise in excruciating detail.
Now, none of that may matter in some cases. Probably most of the PJ work that is destined for low-quality newspaper reproduction will never be looked at again, and certainly not reprocessed. Speed is of the essence and if your technique is up to par, you can get perfectly good, salable JPGs right out of the camera. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
On the other hand, most everyone keeps way more pictures archived than they are ever likely to need, because, well, ya never know. To me, if something is worth keeping it only makes sense to keep it in a format that offers the greatest future potential. So I shoot exclusively in raw and save the raw files along with the processed results. For me, the processing time difference is trivial and disk space seems to be approaching free, so I have little to lose.
If you shoot RAW, it would be prudent to have a jpg backup. Since each camera has its own way of using RAW, and many times editing software requires codec to read the files, there may problems in the future in regards to reading RAW files. Since jpg is the standard, it will be easier for archivist to retrieve jpg files. Retrieving RAW files will be harder. People have a hard time now when a new camera comes out and software isn't up to date to handle it. Imagine 20-30-40 years down the road when the cameras is obsolete and you have try to find the codec to read the files.
If you shoot RAW, it would be prudent to have a jpg backup. Since each camera has its own way of using RAW, and many times editing software requires codec to read the files, there may problems in the future in regards to reading RAW files. Since jpg is the standard, it will be easier for archivist to retrieve jpg files. Retrieving RAW files will be harder. People have a hard time now when a new camera comes out and software isn't up to date to handle it. Imagine 20-30-40 years down the road when the cameras is obsolete and you have try to find the codec to read the files.
True. You also will need to make sure your archive media are readable. But these are tasks that are easily accomplished if you give proper attention to archive maintenance. I still have WordStar files around, but they're no longer on 5 1/4" floppy disks. I don't have a working copy of WordStar, but many years ago I used a converter program to update them to RTF, and if RTF goes out of fashion, I will convert them to something else. There are likely billions of .CR2 files out there and there is already a way to convert them to .DNG if you want. I don't think there's much danger of getting left high and dry unless you are living under a rock.
The way I see it, if it's right, it's right. If it is not right when you push the shutter button, go back and try it again till it is right... but that is just me. I am still in school because I sometimes need help, so back to class I go
Well, if you're implying doing pp on a photo isn't what someone should do, I encourage you to spend some time looking at what the pros do and have been doing since the film days. Plenty of pp going on and there's no problem with that.
Would be great if every shot was perfect out of the camera but this just isn't possible...
I only shoot RAW and for the following (personal) reasons:
1. Maximum flexibility if/when I mess something up (oh, and I WILL mess something up...), such as WB
2. Futureproof my PP needs. I have gone back and created some decent tone mapped pics out of single exposures resaved at multiple stops, which is easier with RAW.
3. I shoot with a 7D, so, well...I am always right. tiptoe
Canon 7D and some stuff that sticks on the end of it.
Umm, no, that is not what I am implying. What I am impling is that if you are having to pp because of lack of basic fundamental skills, then you really should try and master the fundamentals first. What I mean is that if you are taking a pic of a person and a tree looks like it is growing out of the subject's head, don't mask it out, learn from it. If you are taking portraits and you can not get a good image because of the persons complexion or clothing/background contrasts make the cameras metering go wierd, go back to 1st base and figure out what you did wrong, not pp it to death.
Like I said, I do shoot in raw especially when I know I do not have it perfect. Like timk said, the camera does some pp for you. I was only suggesting that you really should not rely on pp to make a killer image. But that is me, and I am old school I guess.
Who said anything about cloning out a tree? What about (as other posters have mentioned) correcting WB or what if the lighting wasn't quite right and you want to fix that in pp, what about cropping, etc. You seem to suffer from the, "If you can't get it right in camera, then you need to go back to school," syndrome. Again, it is normal to perform pp on your files.
There are many other reasons to shoot RAW. You don't see the value in it, that's fine but don't make it seem like everyone out there who performs pp on their work don't know what they're doing. Whether you meant it or not, that's exactly how it was taken by many.
Who said anything about cloning out a tree? What about (as other posters have mentioned) correcting WB or what if the lighting wasn't quite right and you want to fix that in pp, what about cropping, etc. You seem to suffer from the, "If you can't get it right in camera, then you need to go back to school," syndrome. Again, it is normal to perform pp on your files.
There are many other reasons to shoot RAW. You don't see the value in it, that's fine but don't make it seem like everyone out there who performs pp on their work don't know what they're doing. Whether you meant it or not, that's exactly how it was taken by many.
I just finished massaging some family shots for Youtube - also in my Smugmug Gallery under with Morgan to Hastings or somesuch. There are no great keepers here but it was a lot easier to process the JPEGs - hardly any pp needed. All the RAWs needed a couple of minutes work to make them ok.
This is a core difference. Much better if you can get it right in the camera. Still it is a joy to dodge around a RAW picture and see it come to life.
If I was a pro I would be on top of RAW, I know that. Even if I shoot JPEGs whenever I can.
I've read through (most) of this thread, and find the information from both sides very interesting. I first started using raw for my theatre shoots - the lighting is highly variable (and out of my control), and I often shoot high ISO (on the 7d, regularly at 1000-2000), meaning that the extra DR, WB, exposure adjustment and noise reduction/sharpening workflow offered by RAW has been invaluable. Once I realised how much more *control* I had over the final shot when shooting RAW, I never went back. I sometimes wish I'd remember to switch to jpg when I'm just taking family snapshots, or photos of gear to sell or something less critical, but I usually forget. One of these days when I see a flashcard sale I'll stock up on 16g cards and just leave the camera permanently set to RAW+jpg so I can have the best of both worlds, just discarding the shots I don't need for any particular situation.....
Nothing really to add to the argument for either format, just an example of why it's useful in my case. As Pathfinder said (apologies if it was somebody else - this is a long thread!) both are valuable, and each photographer can choose which format suits his subject and workflow the best and yields the best final results *for that situation*. I'm not quite sure why it becomes a "matter of honour" to shoot one or the other. Potayto, potahto and all that.....
I shoot JPEG most of the time. I've shot raw and after all the time processing them they look exactly like the JPEGs right out of the camera, so it saves time/effort to just shoot in JPEG. To each his own of course.
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Link to my Smugmug site
Is there a spot anywhere in RAW showing where the AF point was set? >>
Also DPP (for Canon)
pp
Flickr
My take on this is that I paid a lot of hard-earned cash for my gear, and I would like to have all the data it's capable of producing, as opposed to watching an 8-bit JPEG come out the back. If I have an $1800 body/14-bit sensor and a $1000 lens and I could have recovered the highlight details on the white dress if it had been shot in raw but I can't because they already got baked out of the JPEG, well, I feel I'm not getting the most use of what I paid good money for, that a portion of that $2800 worth of data, that could have made a difference, got left on the cutting room floor inside the camera.
This is not meant to say that JPEG shooters are wasting their equipment. If you're getting the exposures you want, then great, you're saving tons of storage, don't shoot raw. But not everyone shoots where the subject is not moving and the camera can be locked down on a tripod at ISO 100 and you can spend 5 minutes working out the perfect exposure and white balance settings in camera. Raw's great to rescue images that were a little off because of the rapid-reaction shooting conditions in changing light like a wedding.
Absolutely. You need a special viewer to see it (Like Nikon View for Nikons<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/mwink.gif" border="0" alt="" >) but it's there.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I do pj work and I shoot jpg. Most pj's I know shoot jpg. I don't even shoot at the highest quality jpg setting. I just cannot tell a difference. If I were commissioned for billboard or a family wanted a huge phot to hang over the mantle, then I would shoot RAW. If a photograph is good, it is good regardless of format it was shot in. I try to get the photograph as close to perfect in camera and I can do all the editing I need on jpg files. Save the original and edit on the copy. I try to spend as little time editing as possible. Shooting jpg, getting right in the camera, and doing basic toning is all I want to do.
I am not against shooting RAW, I just don't see the benefits unless I know ahead of time the specific purpose and its needed for the job. Otherwise, I shoot jpg 99% of the time, and that includes submissions to publications. If I get that one in a million shot of bigfoot or a UFO, it will not really matter what format it was shot in. The photo of the airplane in the Hudson Rover that got published around the world was taken with an iphone.
Sorry, I disagree. More correct would be proper exposure is all about technique and experience. Shooting RAW is no substitute for circumverting technique.
You don’t need to convince me. I have experimented with RAW and know its benefit. It does serve its purpose under certain uncontrollable condition. But in a right exposure (within the histogram), you will deem to see similar thing you have in RAW, no extra bonus of highlights or shadows as you alleged. Not from our normal screen size. If there were, it could be beyond 200% to see the minute difference. The data could be there, whether our naked eye can perceive is frequently ignore.
If you care to read my other posts in this thread carefully, I’m not against people using RAW, neither did I convince jpeg is the way to go. I’ve done RAW and I know what is RAW. Pse read again.
I’m a serious hobbyist and I do care very much about how my final image looks. I do not make money out of it. I have my full time job and photography is just my passion. I’m not interested in the overwhelming of bits, stops, charts, graphs, or what’s not. I’m not interested in organizing the huge file, transferring, archiving and throwing away good money to buy disc (yeah I know its cheap). Jpeg serve me well 98% of the time for my intended purpose. So there is no necessity for me just to take RAW in search of the shadows, highlights or DR for that elusive 2, 3 or 5%. That's what I encountered.
On the contrary, there was hard talk calling “insane” for not taking RAW. These are the people that blows my mind. I’d be glad if you can point out to me where have I gone trashing people and I will stand corrected.
What I actually said was that a "modern PRO would be insane NOT TO BE ABLE to shoot Raw". This does NOT mean he or she should always shoot RAW. When you read my posts carefully you will see that I, like most people, see that RAW and JPEG both have a role to play. I am sorry to use the word "insane" because it has offended you and clouded my message; perhaps "bizarre", "surprising", "unusual" would have been better choices.
Shooting RAW is not simply a matter of changing the settings on the camera - as you say elsewhere. A RAW photo almost always needs post processing. So shooting RAW is NOT a good advice for an amateur who does not invest the time in learning to do post. Being ABLE TO shoot RAW is good advice for a PRO because he or she can squeeze a bit more from the image when conditions call for it.
I hope this takes the emotional steam out of our exchanges which threaten to spoil an otherwise excellent thread.
That said, I would like to emphasize a point colourbox made, oh, about 300 posts ago. While you may not see much difference in your results today, both hardware and software are going to continue improving exponentially for the foreseeable future. Most of the output devices (screens and printers) in use today are 8 bits per channel (some screens are less), and do not even render the full gamut of color that an 8-bit JPG can encode. I think this is the primary reason it's sometimes hard to distinguish the difference that raw processing can make. Think of a stereo system with lousy speakers and ask yourself whether it makes sense to add a top-of-the-line amplifier--the sound is still going to be lousy.
But surely that's going to change over time. I haven't the slightest doubt that output devices will be 16 or more bits in the not-too-distant future. Processing software will likewise become more powerful. At that point, it may be a terrible loss if your old pics are only available in 8 bits, especially if they were 12 or 14 or 16 bits while on the sensor. To return to the stereo example, it would be like only buying worn, dusty, scratchy LPs because your speakers are lousy anyway. When you finally acquire good speakers, you will be stuck with worn and scratchy sound, only you will get to hear the noise in excruciating detail.
Now, none of that may matter in some cases. Probably most of the PJ work that is destined for low-quality newspaper reproduction will never be looked at again, and certainly not reprocessed. Speed is of the essence and if your technique is up to par, you can get perfectly good, salable JPGs right out of the camera. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
On the other hand, most everyone keeps way more pictures archived than they are ever likely to need, because, well, ya never know. To me, if something is worth keeping it only makes sense to keep it in a format that offers the greatest future potential. So I shoot exclusively in raw and save the raw files along with the processed results. For me, the processing time difference is trivial and disk space seems to be approaching free, so I have little to lose.
There's a lot being said about the extra DR that raw gives you.
Ziggy posted a chart showing that you lose more of the dark shades when shooting jpg. (at least thats what I think it meant)
So even if you shot raw, did all the work to bring out that DR, don't you still convert it to a jpg to send it to a printer?
Doesn't that shot become an 8 bit file?
One last question for richy, a 30 x 40 bridal shot?
I guess the people I know are a bit less into themselves.
The largest wedding shot I've seen in friends homes are 8 x 10.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
www.tednghiem.com
Are you kidding? It's as much fun as Nikon v Canon!
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Pretty serious. I am pretty much with the "whatever works for me is good for me" crowd.
www.tednghiem.com
Having extra data in the shadow regions helps if you want to retrieve the detail in the shadows.
Let's all agree that 8 bit JPG is the most common "delivery" format for images (which it is). If you shoot RAW at 12 or 14 bits of information (which all modern dSLRs do during image capture) it allows post processing of any region of the extended dynamic range into the 8 bits required for JPG, but "you", the person using the image processor software, get to decide how those tones are distributed.
Let's say that, for the sake of argument, a camera captures 14 bits of information. Let's represent that data with simple integers:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Now let's represent the 8 bit data of JPG with simple integers:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
When you shoot to JPG in the camera you are trusting the camera to know how you want that extended 14 bit data interpreted into the 8 bit data. If you use the default in-camera processing to JPG it generally just chooses the central portion of 14 bit data and copies it to 8 bits, kind of like:
4=1
5=2
6=3
7=4
8=5
9=6
10=7
11=8
Since the deep shadows are in bits 1, 2 and 3 of the RAW data, that data has been discarded (in this simplified scenario). Likewise for the highlights.
In reality, the situation is not quite this harsh because the camera's image processor uses a non-linear conversion, but it's still true that if you start with more data you have more data to process with and "you" get to decide how to process the data. If you process from RAW files, "you" get to decide what tones deserve to be preserved into the 8 bit output and "you" get to decide how the tones are distributed. It is this level of precision that, I think, helps to define the image tonality.
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If you shoot RAW, it would be prudent to have a jpg backup. Since each camera has its own way of using RAW, and many times editing software requires codec to read the files, there may problems in the future in regards to reading RAW files. Since jpg is the standard, it will be easier for archivist to retrieve jpg files. Retrieving RAW files will be harder. People have a hard time now when a new camera comes out and software isn't up to date to handle it. Imagine 20-30-40 years down the road when the cameras is obsolete and you have try to find the codec to read the files.
Well, if you're implying doing pp on a photo isn't what someone should do, I encourage you to spend some time looking at what the pros do and have been doing since the film days. Plenty of pp going on and there's no problem with that.
Would be great if every shot was perfect out of the camera but this just isn't possible...
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I think you guys misunderstood each other, which is a shame as it is good to see a relatively new contributor chipping in.
The thing about 7D being a pro-camera is a bit of an in-joke for regular posters. I don't suppose you meant to cause any offense.
There are a lot of serious shooters who like JPEG and only use RAW in critical circumstances. I think this is the bottom line for this thread.
1. Maximum flexibility if/when I mess something up (oh, and I WILL mess something up...), such as WB
2. Futureproof my PP needs. I have gone back and created some decent tone mapped pics out of single exposures resaved at multiple stops, which is easier with RAW.
3. I shoot with a 7D, so, well...I am always right.
Who said anything about cloning out a tree? What about (as other posters have mentioned) correcting WB or what if the lighting wasn't quite right and you want to fix that in pp, what about cropping, etc. You seem to suffer from the, "If you can't get it right in camera, then you need to go back to school," syndrome. Again, it is normal to perform pp on your files.
There are many other reasons to shoot RAW. You don't see the value in it, that's fine but don't make it seem like everyone out there who performs pp on their work don't know what they're doing. Whether you meant it or not, that's exactly how it was taken by many.
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I just finished massaging some family shots for Youtube - also in my Smugmug Gallery under with Morgan to Hastings or somesuch. There are no great keepers here but it was a lot easier to process the JPEGs - hardly any pp needed. All the RAWs needed a couple of minutes work to make them ok.
This is a core difference. Much better if you can get it right in the camera. Still it is a joy to dodge around a RAW picture and see it come to life.
If I was a pro I would be on top of RAW, I know that. Even if I shoot JPEGs whenever I can.
Nothing really to add to the argument for either format, just an example of why it's useful in my case. As Pathfinder said (apologies if it was somebody else - this is a long thread!) both are valuable, and each photographer can choose which format suits his subject and workflow the best and yields the best final results *for that situation*. I'm not quite sure why it becomes a "matter of honour" to shoot one or the other. Potayto, potahto and all that.....
But for an opera diva, isn't it always "potahto" unless you're doing Pygmalion?
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I think it's "potata" if it's an Italian opera.
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Shoot what you want and let others shoot what they want. Although, everyone would get along if they had a Nikon 7D and just used AUTO like I do!
<Insert some profound quote here to try and seem like a deep thinker>
Michael Wachel Photography
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I'll trade you for my Canon D700.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
DEAL!
<Insert some profound quote here to try and seem like a deep thinker>
Michael Wachel Photography
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