Unprocessed RAW v JPEG print test

[Marc Sabatella]

Originally Posted by drewdlephone

To be honest, for all the post-editing ability RAW has, it's a royal pain in the ass to work with unless you know what to expect when you export the pictures. I tried different workflows for months with things like landscape and sunset photography (where the colors are obvious) and finally had to give up and admit that I was never going to get out of the file what I was seeing previewed on the camera, unless I shoot in JPEG.

If RAW retained the original processing applied in-body by the camera, including color modes and sharpness adjustments, then it would be far more useful. But I can keep dreaming.

You don't say what software you were using, but as others have mentioned, the Pentax software will listen to and reproduce pretty much all camera settings. Other programs generally at leats try to reproduce some options. ACDSee Pro, for example, will increase sharpness and saturation if you set those in camera, but that may be about it.

On the other hand, also don't find it particularly difficult to adjust color or anything else the way I want. Nor do I think of reproducing what the camera did to be my ultimate goal. Especially with sunrise/sunset pictures, where AWB usually washes out the colors terribly. I find setting the WB to "flash" is often the best way to capture strong lighting effects. Doesn't matter whether you do in in camera or in PP - takes but a second or two either way.

[ManuH]

Originally Posted by Ashley

The crops I printed out at 200% revealed the raw image to be the same in colour and contrast but sharper than the jpeg!

I opened the images in Photoshop Elements 6 and printed from there.

I've been using raw for a few months now but have never tried to print the unprocessed raw photo.

Has anyone else tried this?

All things being equal the raw file contains much more information.
1) K10D raws are 36-bits color vs 24-bits for jpeg.
2) jpeg is compressed, hard edges will often suffer.
3) jpeg are created by the tiny camera on-board processor in a fraction of a second, leading to some compromises

This is the theory. In practice most people won't see any significant differences. The real difference is when you process the picture, for reasons a lot of people already pointed out in this thread.

[pingflood]

Originally Posted by ManuH

All things being equal the raw file contains much more information.
1) K10D raws are 36-bits color vs 24-bits for jpeg.
2) jpeg is compressed, hard edges will often suffer.
3) jpeg are created by the tiny camera on-board processor in a fraction of a second, leading to some compromises

This is the theory. In practice most people won't see any significant differences. The real difference is when you process the picture, for reasons a lot of people already pointed out in this thread.

I can see #1 and #2, but not so sure about #3. Yeah, the camera doesn't have a massive CPU, but it does have hardware optimized to do just jpeg compression. I don't think a lack of processing power leads to inherently inferior jpegs; in fact the output from most cameras can be pretty damn decent.

[procyon]

Originally Posted by pingflood

I can see #1 and #2, but not so sure about #3. Yeah, the camera doesn't have a massive CPU, but it does have hardware optimized to do just jpeg compression. I don't think a lack of processing power leads to inherently inferior jpegs; in fact the output from most cameras can be pretty damn decent.

One example: if you compare the size (in pixels) of camera jpg versus raw export you will see that most raw converters output a slightly larger image (slightly wider view, not just stretching it). That is because processing the pixels near edges needs a more complicated algorithm(edge pixels don't have enough neighbouring pixels so they need a different interpolation codepath), so in camera processing just crops them out to simplify matters.

[drewdlephone]

Originally Posted by Gooshin

i'm just thinking outloud but i think if you use the software supplied with pentax then you will get exactly that

but no one bothers with that...

I'd bother with it if it wasn't such a bag of ass. It's hard for me to get more pointed than that about Pentax, but their software is seriously lacking compared to most brands and what is supplied. It kept crashing on my Mac (OS X 10.5) so I gave up. That was with the most recent version off the web, with the K200D.

[dylansalt]

I was in the same dilemma and a very strong for jpeg arguer for the reasons you stated until I tried this free utility-" Stepok's Raw Importer"

It accepts DNG only from Pentax and I really can see a large difference -especially with color fidelity & sharpness.

Below is a shot converted from dng using the importer - it's the first time I can accept as when I shot the flower in jpeg it always came out overblown red and lacked detail

[Gooshin]

Originally Posted by Clicker

When you're printing make sure you set the profile to Adobe RGB

yes, because his monitor and printer are perfectly calibrated to adobe RGB