Originally posted by Cerebum RAW. Thread closed
But is it quite so cut and dried? I have LBA which has led to me having ten vintage manual lenses. I want to exploit their characteristics so I am going to put them on my K30 and play. Now normally I shoot RAW and process but am I losing the character of the lens by doing that? And if I am not going to process (I am thinking of using this as a no prosessing, wysiwyg challenge) do I need to shoot RAW at all? After all, the K30/50/70 does a nice job of jpeg! Thoughts? I am still a newbie and every day is a school day.
When you shoot RAW, you're capturing a lot more information than your computer or printer can reproduce visually. With all processing options in your software set to zero or disabled, you see the image exactly as the sensor captured it, flaws and all, but there's also a lot more information behind the image that you don't see - colour and contrast gradations, for example. If you can't see them, you'd think they might be unimportant, but they add a great deal of flexibility and smoothness in your post-processing options. As you add overall contrast, local contrast (clarity), tone curves, colour adjustments, etc. all that extra information is helpful in pulling out the best possible image.
When you shoot JPEG, all of that extra information is thrown away. You can still make all the same adjustments, but if the extra information is gone, they'll be based on what's left. Worse still, JPEGs have a lot of sharpening, tone curve, contrast and other adjustments built into them. As a result, you're not seeing the exact image that the sensor recorded - you're not seeing the exact image produced by that vintage lens. You're seeing a camera-enhanced version of it.
There's no right or wrong approach to this... we're all different. Choose what works for you. Me, I like to shoot RAW and see the image with all its character and flaws... be that low contrast / micro-contrast, poor sharpness, etc. I can always process my RAW files to look like an in-camera JPEG, but I can never remove the adjustments baked into an actual in-camera JPEG.