Shooting RAW?????

Bell Ringer · July 16, 2006

I have read several threads which relate to shooting in the RAW mode. How beneficial is this method and what benefits does it produce? Thanks

Dna · July 16, 2006

Google is your friend ...

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-19,GGGL:en&q=raw+vs+jpeg

As Ken says, "If you have to ask, shoot jpg." http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

Dna

Art Scott · July 16, 2006

Bell Ringer wrote:

I have read several threads which relate to shooting in the RAW mode. How beneficial is this method and what benefits does it produce? Thanks

Raw format is your Digital Negative...uncompressed, totally unprocessed ---- raw....A LITTLE COMPARISON TO FILM.....ever shoot Polaroid.....a jpg or tiff are close to being polaroid for the digital age.....not much you can do in the darkroom with a polaroid is there?
But with a neg or transparency (RAW FILE) in the darkroom (PHOTOSHOP), well now we have a world of possibilites to explore......

Go to yur nearest Barnes and Noble or Borders Books (these are my favorite libraries) and read Real World Raw.....great book on RAW.....and for those that are shooting raw, well it is not just a monday night thing...It is every night.........

Sure jpg saves faster in your camera and jpg doubles or triples the amount of pics you can put on one card.....but from my stand point that is the end of its true usability as a negative file format........I learned the hard way...shot a wedding in jpg cause all I had was 1 lousy 2gb card....in raw format 162 shots.....extra fine (the best ) JPg put me at over 300 images....it was my first wedding in over 10 yrs (photo'ing quit being fun and a creative outlet for me so I put eveything away and turned down work year after year) and I made the jump headlong to Digital.....and shooting jpg was the worst thing I did.....it was to be a beautiful fall day..the leaves were turning and the wedding was to be outdoors in a beautiful park.....well the weather went south and the wedding was moved to an old office building that was being renovated and the colors inside were absolutely terrible and and I wound up shooting everysingle shot with a flash....if I had shot in Raw I could have saved a lot more of the blown highlights and it would have been a lot faster fixing probs....buuuuut no I had to jpg as recommended by another "pro" wedding photog........well it killed me with retouch work and I have never shot in jpg again unless it is shots for ebay...those I don't process anyway so I don't care.

hope this helps

Bell Ringer · July 16, 2006

Dna wrote:

Google is your friend ...

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-19,GGGL:en&q=raw+vs+jpeg

As Ken says, "If you have to ask, shoot jpg." http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

Dna

Thanks for the suggestion. Will follow-up. But I really would like to know the difference.

Bell Ringer · July 16, 2006

Art Scott wrote:

Raw format is your Digital Negative...uncompressed, totally unprocessed ---- raw....A LITTLE COMPARISON TO FILM.....ever shoot Polaroid.....a jpg or tiff are close to being polaroid for the digital age.....not much you can do in the darkroom with a polaroid is there?
But with a neg or transparency (RAW FILE) in the darkroom (PHOTOSHOP), well now we have a world of possibilites to explore......

Go to yur nearest Barnes and Noble or Borders Books (these are my favorite libraries) and read Real World Raw.....great book on RAW.....and for those that are shooting raw, well it is not just a monday night thing...It is every night.........

Sure jpg saves faster in your camera and jpg doubles or triples the amount of pics you can put on one card.....but from my stand point that is the end of its true usability as a negative file format........I learned the hard way...shot a wedding in jpg cause all I had was 1 lousy 2gb card....in raw format 162 shots.....extra fine (the best ) JPg put me at over 300 images....it was my first wedding in over 10 yrs (photo'ing quit being fun and a creative outlet for me so I put eveything away and turned down work year after year) and I made the jump headlong to Digital.....and shooting jpg was the worst thing I did.....it was to be a beautiful fall day..the leaves were turning and the wedding was to be outdoors in a beautiful park.....well the weather went south and the wedding was moved to an old office building that was being renovated and the colors inside were absolutely terrible and and I wound up shooting everysingle shot with a flash....if I had shot in Raw I could have saved a lot more of the blown highlights and it would have been a lot faster fixing probs....buuuuut no I had to jpg as recommended by another "pro" wedding photog........well it killed me with retouch work and I have never shot in jpg again unless it is shots for ebay...those I don't process anyway so I don't care.

hope this helps

Art, you are a virtual library. Thanks for the explanation and resources. Exactly the kind of cliff notes lesson I was looking for.

Mike Lane · July 16, 2006

Dna wrote:

As Ken says, "If you have to ask, shoot jpg." http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

Geeze, Ken Rockwell can be such a condescending jerk. Why anyone takes him seriously is beyond me. There's so much better camera, compter, etc info out there on the net, that I just shiver when someone posts one of his little quips.

So what he's saying is that if you aren't a super cool camera stud like Ken who just magically knows everything there is to know about photography then you shouldn't bother with highly complex tasks like shooting an image in raw format. After all, if you don't know about it, you probably don't have the motor skills or the cognitive understanding to do anything beyond point the camera in the general direction of something and take a snapshot. Anyone who must ask photography questions (or uses windows - which is another story of his) can never call themselves a photographer.

Sorry Dna, that was directed to Ken not you. It's not you, it's Ken. I know it was flame-a-riffic but please don't hold it against me.

System · July 16, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

Sorry Dna, that was directed to Ken not you. It's not you, it's Ken. I know it was flame-a-riffic but please don't hold it against me.

No worries, elitism is nothing more than intellectual racism devoted to keeping information out of the hands of others in order to maintain a sense of superiortiy. It's childish and usually the realm of the truly talentless.

mwgrice · July 16, 2006

truth wrote:

No worries, elitism is nothing more than intellectual racism devoted to keeping information out of the hands of others in order to maintain a sense of superiortiy. It's childish and usually the realm of the truly talentless.

God help me, but I actually think Rockwell is being fairly reasonable here:

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Each format has no absolute goodness; it's all in how appropriate they are to your particular work at hand. Everyone's need vary and I just happen to prefer JPG.

[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]He does have a knack for making me grit my teeth even when I agree with him.
[/FONT]

Seefutlung · July 16, 2006

Bell Ringer-

RAW is "just" another tool useful for getting/improving your photographs. Just as Photo Shop (or equal) improves your photos, so does RAW.

RAW is an unatered files which contains all the information your camera can capture of your image. This file needs to be processed into a JPG or TIFF or whatever in order for it to be useful. It is the initial processing which makes RAW a valuable tool for photo improvement.

In a nutshell:
RAW processing one has a ton more latitude in color, contrast, shadow, highlight, et al, adjustments than an out-of-the-camera JPG.

One can get a decent photo from a shot that would have be blown with JPG. And one can improve upon an already good/great shot.

RAW will not save every blown shot, nor will it make an unsharp photo sharp, but like cropping, contrast, saturation, burning, et cetera, it is just another tool for improving one's final image.

Antonio Correia · July 16, 2006

Seefutlung wrote:

Bell Ringer-

RAW is "just" another tool useful for getting/improving your photographs. Just as Photo Shop (or equal) improves your photos, so does RAW.

RAW is an unatered files which contains all the information your camera can capture of your image. This file needs to be processed into a JPG or TIFF or whatever in order for it to be useful. It is the initial processing which makes RAW a valuable tool for photo improvement.

In a nutshell:
RAW processing one has a ton more latitude in color, contrast, shadow, highlight, et al, adjustments than an out-of-the-camera JPG.

One can get a decent photo from a shot that would have be blown with JPG. And one can improve upon an already good/great shot.

RAW will not save every blown shot, nor will it make an unsharp photo sharp, but like cropping, contrast, saturation, burning, et cetera, it is just another tool for improving one's final image.

thumb

colourbox · July 16, 2006

Other analogies:

With JPEG, you let the camera's computer decide how to develop the unprocessed digital film into a JPEG.
With RAW, you decide how to develop the unprocessed digital film into a JPEG.

With JPEG, you get an 8-bit file that the camera processed from your 12-bit camera sensor.
With RAW, you get all 12 bits from the sensor and you can develop it in a way that could be better than what the camera gave you.

JPEG is like having the lab develop your film.
RAW is like developing your film in your own darkroom.

Notice with these examples that RAW isn't about the end product, the final file. RAW is about having better starting data from which you can, with the right skills, create a better end product. If don't have those skills yet, you might get better images from shooting JPEG for now.

Nikolai · July 16, 2006

RAW vs JPEG

mwgrice wrote:

God help me, but I actually think Rockwell is being fairly reasonable here:

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Each format has no absolute goodness; it's all in how appropriate they are to your particular work at hand. Everyone's need vary and I just happen to prefer JPG.[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]He does have a knack for making me grit my teeth even when I agree with him.
[/FONT]

Using Ken's own analogy with food, RAW is your raw meat, raw fish, raw veggies and spices in jars. You can prepare anything you want. Obviously, you need some time (it's not a fast food), skills (how many good chefs are out there?) and a good kitchen with a good set of tools (fast computer and a good processing software). However, your possibilities are pretty much endless.

JPEG is the meal served. It's been sliced, diced, spiced, fried, roasted, cooked and laid on a plate. You can add some salt and pepper, but that's pretty much it.

Depending on what you do, both can be very useful.

High volume sport event shooters, who take hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures on a daily basis, know their locations to a foot and their exposures to a fraction of an f/stop can utilize the speed and size of JPEGs, since they simply won't have time to post-process all this plunder. Some of them are even shooting small jpegs, since nobody is gonna order a 20x30 from a "yet another" run or ride.

However, if you do think that you may work with an image for longer than a few seconds, skipping the benefits of the RAW would be akin to trying to prepare a a five-star meal from a package you got from a frozen food section...

All in all - it's your call...

Antonio Correia · July 16, 2006

Nikolai wrote:

Using Ken's own analogy with food, RAW is your raw meat, raw fish, raw veggies and spices in jars. You can prepare anything you want. Obviously, you kneed some time (it's not a fast food), skills (how many good chefs are out there?) and a good kitchen with a good set of tools (fast computer and a processing software). However, your possibilities are pretty much endless.

JPEG is the meal served. It's been sliced, diced, spiced, fried, roasted, cooked and laid on a plate. You can add some salt and pepper, but that's pretty much it.

Depending on what you do, both can be very useful.

High volume sport event shooters, who take hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures on a daily basis, know their locations to a foot and their exposures to a fraction of an f/stop can utilize the speed and size of JPEGs, since they simply won't have time to post-process all this plunder. Some of them are even shooting small jpegs, since nobody is gonna order a 20x30 from a "yet another" run or ride.

However, if you do think that you may work with an image for longer than a few seconds, skipping the benefits of the RAW would be akin to trying to prepare a a five-star meal from a package you got from a frozen food section...

Al in all - it's your call...

Funny, original and inventive way to talk about RAW ...

Dna · July 16, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

Sorry Dna, that was directed to Ken not you. It's not you, it's Ken. I know it was flame-a-riffic but please don't hold it against me.

Heh heh, no problem. I happen to agree with you about Ken, but he makes some good points in that particular article. I shoot raw for the majority of my work, but shoot jpgs for sports stuff. Mainly because of the space issue, not needing the extra edge of raw and because only 1 in 10 get printed ...

Dna

SDJames · July 18, 2006

I just heard that RAW was more versatile and started shooting, even for kids BMX and surf sessions. Yes, it may take some post processing, but it's flexible! I have learned quite a bit about how to shoot, simply from processing the RAW files. The better the shot, the less processing that needs to be done.

vangogh · July 18, 2006

Thanks very much for this thread, I've found it very useful. Initially when i first got the camera, I shot in raw, but because I found the post processing process very cumbersome I've changed to jpeg. Also there are of course space issues (I need to get a new card). I use the Olympus browser to view the pics & then using a raw converter, covert them in PS. What I found frustrating, was that unless I used the Olympus browser first, to view the pic I had no way of knowing what the pic I was trying to open looked like. Also what I found difficult about the raw conversion process was that there was no preview facility after you've made the selections you want. If you don't like the result, you have to start from scratch

With jpeg it views immediately in ps, which means I can select which pics I want much more easily, but of course lose the finesse.

I haven't really had time yet to try different raw converters that people kindly suggested when I posted before about this, so don't know whether any of these have a preview facility.

Mike Lane · July 18, 2006

What you need is the Microsoft RAW Thumbnailer and Viewer

Antonio Correia · July 18, 2006

I shoot RAW all the time.
But sometimes I wonder if it worth while, considering what I want from the photos.
And this is: post, paper with 20/30 (A4 sheet of paper) maximum.
Better photoshoping also.

Hum ...

I keep RAW still.

ChuckM · July 18, 2006

I'm a serious rookie but I usually shoot RAW. I don't do much post but I would be heartbroken if I catch a great image and can't work with it down the road. I guess I do it "just in case".

Shooting RAW?????

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