Why I shoot RAW...

[m8o]

Some people new to all this stuff sometimes wonder why... It was a bit over 2 years ago when I was wondering why.

Well, I shoot RAW+ actually. Which means a JPEG is generated. But I rarely even look @ the JPEG. After finding the best focused version of a photo I took a bunch of shots of, I happened to look at the JPEG out of the camera. It reminded me of just why I shoot RAW and spend so much time performing painstaking post processing...

Out of the camera, with 5 miles of moist air between me and the primary subjects that so interested me (of the towers and partial obstruction by the steam):

RAW post processed in Lightroom to the way my mind remembered my eye seeing the scene thru the viewfinder lit by the setting sun to my left:


Hope this helps the new folks wondering "why RAW?".

[heliphoto]

That's a beautiful (if scary) image.

I think you might have got it there from a jpg, but I shoot RAW too so I hear ya on that point.

[m8o]

You bring up a good point. I figure I'll also share that I learn two important things regarding post-processing JPEGs to keep in mind for any considering it.

1) Oversharpening... the Pentax's in-camera software actually does a very decent job of sharpening. It does however use a small radius. If one want to accentuate the darks as I did in this photo above, to really bring-out the wires holding-up the antenna on the right, that's best done with a very large sharpening radius. I think I used 2.5 in this photo. I usually only use 0.7 - 1.3. Other then that, even applying light, small radius sharpening to a JPEG in Lightroom will just be too much sharpening of the JPEG.

2) Hot pixels... My camera with over 20,000 activations suffers from it terribly it seems; use a long shutter speed and I'd say I get 100's if not thousands of hot-pixels. And the Pentax in-camera conversion doesn't eliminate it at all. It keeps the seriously 'off color' hot-pixel there, and you'll also get some pretty noticeable sharpening artifacts around it. (While the in-camera sharpening does well with normal subjects, a hot-pixel always gets a halo around it.) However Lightroom handles a super-bright off-color (both, when compared to all the pixels around it) single pixel hot-spots fantastically, and completely excises the hot pixel. If memory serves me well, you can't apply that noise reduction to a JPEG in that program, let alone undo the sharpening artifact that was caused by it.

[WerTicus]

I took the jpg and pushed it as far as it would go, it was impossible to get it to match effectively.

jpg shopped to hell and back:


raw:


you can see the raw has better WB and dynamic range and contrast.

I'm actually surprised at the result, because when I started editing your image it did it with the intention of showing that your image was not really suited to showing off raw capability properly...

[photog]

m80, you are correct about the ability of RAW to allow you to do the near impossible. It is also worth mentioning that while you can do a lot in LR2 with JPG the penalties for going to the limit are severe.
Blown highlights do not allow too much lightening a seriously dark image, Large adjustments to gamma will lead to banding, LR2 or ACR 5 can process the image in Adobe RGB or even a higher colour space such as ProPhoto. Although you cannot correctly display the image on the agerage monitor not print it LR or ACR can export the image in sRGB or Adobe RGB. My Highend Epson printer can make good use of AdobeRGB.
If you print directly from LR2 it will do an excellent job of down-mixing the image to whetever the printer driver can handle. I get excellent prints with almost 0% failure rate.
For what LR2 cannot do YET edit the image with the LR adjustments and seamlessly return to LR2 for further work if needed.