[angerdan]

The first thing that shows some intellectual user limitations is to assume "JPG shooting" generally equals "no postprocessing".
No approach is "superior" by definition. There are drawbacks to each one. Some people prefer one, other people prefer another.

There's also shooting RAW, do PP in the camera (either for all or single pictures). And have the chance to do PP on PC for selected important/special pictures only, even years later.
Like getting ingredients at the supermarket and cook all by yourself. Would be much faster with nearly the same quality

[panonski]

ok, I'm sorry for some of the statements here

But JPEG today is far superior then in days ....
JPEG with 11 MB is usable to recover 3 stops certainly.... If you're in good exposure... I shoot with Olympus also, and I must admit JPEG from that camera is just insane good...

Only thing you must watch out is not to blown skylights, other then that, shadows you can raise even more, with plenty of details preserved., - only in high ISo you cannot do that as much you would like ... ..
and in that case - Raw would bring slight more power in PP

--

I must admit also, that I was never heavy RAW shooter ( as you can obviously see )

[SpecialK]

For most people, JPG is good enough if you really think about your shot and not about how you can fix your incompetence in front of a computer.

You could also say people are lazy not to look at the image and make improvements, thinking every shot they make is perfect in the camera - even landscapes where you normally have time to "really think about your shot".

[Kerrowdown]

Just Jpg Shooters?

The only time I shoot jpegs only is for the odd press job, which subsequently gets uploaded over the wire or ether for their immediate use.

[BruceBanner]

The first thing that shows some intellectual user limitations is to assume "JPG shooting" generally equals "no postprocessing".

1. There is raw data shooting, which needs manual effort raw development postprocessing in PCs.
2. There is standard in camera raw development shooting ("JPG shooting") with users opting to add manual effort postprocessing in PCs.
3. There is standard in camera raw development shooting ("JPG shooting") with users opting to not touch the JPG.

I simply see it as:

1. Buy ingredients on the fresh market and cook my meal myself following my own recipe, which I adjust each time to my taste
2. Buy ingredients in the next door supermarket and let someone cook my meal following the most common recipe found on the internet. I add some spices sometimes and ask the cooking person to adjust it a little bit each time.
3. Buy ingredients in the next door supermarket and let someone cook my meal following the most common recipe found on the internet all the time.

No approach is "superior" by definition. There are drawbacks to each one. Some people prefer one, other people prefer another.

Nice analogy.

[PDL]

As I see it, when you shoot only JPEG's you get what the engineers think is "good enough". The algorithms and hardware used to generate in camera JPEG's do not really change all that much over the lifetime of the body. So if you are shooting with a older generation body (like my K20D, K10D or K-3II) I would be "stuck" using the same old method that was cooked into the camera. If you shoot JPEG on a 10 year old body, you are using 10 year old processes to create the image.

When you shoot RAW, simply put, you get more data to work with. JPEG creation throws away a good percentage of the information gathered by the sensor. If you know what you are doing and are willing to customize your settings to maximize your information on each shot, then use JPEG, I however, would rather shoot - not chimp to tweak. Also, as RAW conversion software changes (upgraded or manufacturer changes) you get the ability to use the "improved" algorithms on your old RAW images, which can lead to new interpretations. The use of "special" functions in the RAW converter (styles in Capture One), Black and White (not simple desaturation) and advanced sharpening (halo suppression) require RAW data to function. The data necessary to work with this functionality is just not available in JPEG.

And to provide a little background, I have been shooting "pictures" for 50+ years. I have shot nearly everything from 110 sized film to 4x5. I have shot with fully manual cameras to cameras that do everything for you. My father and I built darkroom in our home where I developed, Black and White, color print and transparencies. We printed Black and White and color prints from both color film and transparencies (I still have the enlarger and a good amount of darkroom parts and pieces). I purchased 35mm film (Panatomic-X) in 100 foot rolls and filled the canisters. I taught a class in "Scientific Photography" for Undergraduate Archaeology students. I earned a degree in Computer Science and worked for 30+ years for fortune 500 corporations supporting hardware and software engineers.

Digital imaging is about all about data, the more data the better. And as for "getting it right in camera", that has been my moto since the early days, especially since I started shooting 35mm slides where your leeway for getting a "proper" exposure was/is very narrow. I have taken my fair share of pure rubbish images on both film and digital. The ones that I have been able to "recover/rescue" with the greatest success have been RAW digital images.

JPEG vs RAW shooters is a fools argument. Shoot what you want to shoot, what you are comfortable with. Oh - and as for the argument that you "need a computer to see RAW", well, you need a computer to see JPEG also

[dtmateojr]

As I see it, when you shoot only JPEG's you get what the engineers think is "good enough". The algorithms and hardware used to generate in camera JPEG's do not really change all that much over the lifetime of the body. So if you are shooting with a older generation body (like my K20D, K10D or K-3II) I would be "stuck" using the same old method that was cooked into the camera. If you shoot JPEG on a 10 year old body, you are using 10 year old processes to create the image.

When you shoot RAW, simply put, you get more data to work with. JPEG creation throws away a good percentage of the information gathered by the sensor. If you know what you are doing and are willing to customize your settings to maximize your information on each shot, then use JPEG, I however, would rather shoot - not chimp to tweak. Also, as RAW conversion software changes (upgraded or manufacturer changes) you get the ability to use the "improved" algorithms on your old RAW images, which can lead to new interpretations. The use of "special" functions in the RAW converter (styles in Capture One), Black and White (not simple desaturation) and advanced sharpening (halo suppression) require RAW data to function. The data necessary to work with this functionality is just not available in JPEG.

And to provide a little background, I have been shooting "pictures" for 50+ years. I have shot nearly everything from 110 sized film to 4x5. I have shot with fully manual cameras to cameras that do everything for you. My father and I built darkroom in our home where I developed, Black and White, color print and transparencies. We printed Black and White and color prints from both color film and transparencies (I still have the enlarger and a good amount of darkroom parts and pieces). I purchased 35mm film (Panatomic-X) in 100 foot rolls and filled the canisters. I taught a class in "Scientific Photography" for Undergraduate Archaeology students. I earned a degree in Computer Science and worked for 30+ years for fortune 500 corporations supporting hardware and software engineers.

Digital imaging is about all about data, the more data the better. And as for "getting it right in camera", that has been my moto since the early days, especially since I started shooting 35mm slides where your leeway for getting a "proper" exposure was/is very narrow. I have taken my fair share of pure rubbish images on both film and digital. The ones that I have been able to "recover/rescue" with the greatest success have been RAW digital images.

JPEG vs RAW shooters is a fools argument. Shoot what you want to shoot, what you are comfortable with. Oh - and as for the argument that you "need a computer to see RAW", well, you need a computer to see JPEG also

When you shoot, raw or jpeg, don't you look at your LCD to check if you have captured enough of what you needed? The truth is, you adjust your settings depending on what you see on that tiny screen.

This is precisely why I started shooting mostly jpeg. I shoot raw and in the end I would need to tweak my shots in the computer to make them look like what I saw on my camera's LCD. Double the work. This is why I tend to get very lazy with post processing. It's unnecessary redo of what would have been already an almost finished product.

Of course jpeg out of the camera is not perfect but you only really need to tweak it very lightly. Raw shooters will try to demonstrate how bad jpeg is by using an image that was shot at high ISO and pushing the shadows to show posterisation. This is blatant lying. A properly exposed jpeg shot is as clean as any raw, and you do not need to push shadows or pull the highlights that much. Again, you do not need to show details everywhere. Too much pushing and pulling kills the dynamic range of a shot and it will look very flat. This is the problem with most HDR photos. Subtle tweaking goes a long way but you need to start with a good frame. Choose your subjects, your light, your filters. Heck, top landscape photographers still shoot with very unforgiving slide FILM!!!

Shoot raw if you want but don't tell me that shooting jpeg is bad.

[PDL]

When I shoot RAW I do look at the LCD to see the histogram. I usually look once during a shoot to evaluate that the camera is set up correctly and what the histogram displays, I never look at the white balance as I change that during post processing. I have the JPEG settings set to Zero so no JPEG tweaking is going on - at all. I also have the digital preview set to OFF. In consistent lighting (inside at an event) I will take out my incident light meter and measure what light is happening, take a shot and look at the histogram (with blinkies) and go from there, usually setting the exposure to manual. When shooting for most of the time I am in AV mode and look at the exposure values in the viewfinder, I rarely look at the LCD when shooting while out and about.

If you are using a color managed computer environment, the color you see on your computer screen will be different than the color seen on your uncontrolled LCD. The color as seen by your camera will vary by body and to have the same color displayed by different bodies you need all the data you can get to move the color balance. This is true with film emulsions and digital. In the film days we bought hordes of film with the same emulsion number to make the "sensor" act uniformly across the development cycle. With color film printing you had to change your development processes each time you changed one of the following: film stock, paper, chemicals, light bulb in the enlarger. It is much simpler with digital, but you have to calibrate your monitor and if you print, calibrate your printer profiles for paper and inks. Same old thing. In digital it helps (note I am not saying that it requires) to have the largest amount of data you can get.

If you do not want to shoot RAW, fine, you are limiting yourself to the processing carried out by the camera body. Fine and dandy, I do have a camera (other than my phone) that shoots only JPEG and it does a pretty good job most of the time. But remember, on those rare occasions when everything just screws up, RAW can come to your rescue and it has for me. If you feel lazy about post processing, so be it. But if you change anything in a JPEG, dude, you are post processing. When I first got into shooting with a camera that supported RAW (*ist Ds) I discovered that most decent digital cameras were able to capture a usable image 90% of the time. My mindset is that I am shooting in that 10% where "good enough" just does not cut it.

As for your comment about pushing the shadows and along with landscape usage, please watch this webinar and go to 12:00 minutes.

You Tube

You Tube

Behold the power of RAW and no, his images do not look flat. Just try and use a linear response curve on a JPEG, it is not going to work out all that well. I wish I had this ability back in the days when I was shooting film.

I do not shoot HDR, but I do strive to get as much DR as the image can use. I did the same thing when shooting film (slide film - under expose by 2/3 of an f stop and meter off the highlights, burn and dodge with Black & White). My favorite slide film was Kodachrome 25 and as that slowly went away I shot a lot of Extachrome and Fujichrome. I shot a little bit of Extachrome IR too, which was a hoot.

Also, I did not say that shooting only JPEG is "bad", I said that you are limiting the potential of what you can do with the image. If all you do is shoot "normal" shots... great, keep up the good work. But if you want to play around with cross processing, bizarre color casts, differing Black & White processes, precise color response (think museum documentation) and correcting color casts, then you better be shooting RAW because you are going to need all the data you can get. Even if you shoot only JPEG, make sure that your editing software is non-destructive, otherwise your are SOL.

[beholder3]

When I shoot RAW I do look at the LCD to see the histogram. I usually look once during a shoot to evaluate that the camera is set up correctly and what the histogram displays, I never look at the white balance as I change that during post processing.

Looking at a histrogram in camera is an utter waste of time. Always. You just get the JPG histogram influenced by all the dozens of things that influence it (beyond raw influencing factors).
It is absolutely not better than just watching the preview of the taken shot.

I have the JPEG settings set to Zero so no JPEG tweaking is going on - at all.

You still get a fully developed JPG that is the result of camera chosen white balanced colors and the JPG color profile you chose. And there is no really "neutral" JPG profile. Whatever it is, it is someones personal judgement.
So setting JPG to "zero" only makes things worse. If you want to postprocess JPGs you have to adjust JPGs to be extra shallow contrast. If you want to use them as end result you have to adjust them to look good.

[PDL]

The key phrase in all of my statements above is "I shoot RAW" so the inference is that when you state:

If you want to postprocess JPGs you have to adjust JPGs to be extra shallow contrast.
-snip-
It is absolutely not better than just watching the preview of the taken shot.

is meaningless to me. Once I learned that my cameras shot RAW, I never went back.

Your statement:

Looking at a histrogram in camera is an utter waste of time. Always.

does not reflect on reality. If the histogram is a utter waste of time, then ETTR, classwork (workshops, instruction, youtube for heavens sake) are all wrong. I said, and repeat here, I use the histogram as a guide. It is not a end all be all and along with the "blinkies" it is a tool available for photographers to use to their advantage. If you are a JPEG only shooter, then it should be your primary go to tool to evaluate your images on the fly. I do agree with you that the image on the LCD is really not up to par for critical judgement.

With reference to your "absolutely not better than just watching the preview of the taken shot" - Wait-What? The histogram is the graphical representation of the distribution of colors in the JPEG you are looking at i.e. your preview. From Wikipedia: "For digital images, a color histogram represents the number of pixels that have colors in each of a fixed list of color ranges, that span the image's color space, the set of all possible colors." Please note also that I have stated above that I have turned preview OFF. I only chimp when I question what I think is going on with the exposure.

[GUB]

Looking at a histrogram in camera is an utter waste of time.

I can not think of one situation that the in-camera Histogram has put me wrong. What utter nonsense.

[clackers]

The histogram indicates data loss at the right which is still there in RAW ... ditto in the blacks, so it's of limited use for telling us what we want - the dynamic range of the image we've captured.

But for a JPEG only shooter, sure, it's accurate.

[GUB]

The histogram indicates data loss at the right which is still there in RAW ... ditto in the blacks, so it's of limited use for telling us what we want - the dynamic range of the image we've captured.

But for a JPEG only shooter, sure, it's accurate.

Trying to get my head around this - so you are saying my approach of getting the histo as near to the right as possible without the red warning bar has the potential for unnecessary underexposure?.

[clackers]

Trying to get my head around this - so you are saying my approach of getting the histo as near to the right as possible without the red warning bar has the potential for unnecessary underexposure?.

Oh, definitely.

Remember by going to JPEG too soon (in camera) the tone space has been crushed to 8 bits.

The ETTR game is to expose as much as possible then pull back what are to JPEGs the 'blown' areas in post. There's data there, and more than in the left side, the maths claims.

[PDL]

Oh, definitely.

Remember by going to JPEG too soon (in camera) the tone space has been crushed to 8 bits.

The ETTR game is to expose as much as possible then pull back what are to JPEGs the 'blown' areas in post. There's data there, and more than in the left side, the maths claims.

Precisely why to use the histogram. Turn on the "blinkies" and if there are a lot of them, compensate to get away from the highlight spike. Get the histogram to just touch the right side if possible. Most times there are data (detail) in the highlights that RAW can pull back and use. If you have jacked up your JPEG settings you have messed up even more.

I shoot mostly classical musicians and I expose to get the highlights (piano keys and music) to be just blinking on the LCD. In post processing I can recover those highlights and recover the notes on the page and the cracks between the white keys. It is all a process, very similar to shooting film, but I would have had issues shooting slide film in the current environment since flash is not allowed at the venues or I am shooting from far enough away that a flash would not work. Most of the time the lighting is pretty harsh too.