Originally posted by BigMackCam Norm - further to my earlier response, and with all due respect, I think a fundamental difficulty with your poll may be this: We're not actually being asked to vote on raw vs JPEG as billed in the thread title, but on
your personal processing of raw and JPEG files - which might be your best results based on your own post-processing tastes, software, PP skills, monitor(s) etc., but we all know how subjective post-processing can be, right? On that basis, it's more a case of which photo do we prefer and why, IMHO
I asked four simple questions. Thanks to all who answered. Carry on.
Number one is the jpeg.
There is more detail in the raw, look at the fir tree.
Looking at the bare tree branches, the raw has more detail, the branches and leaves look reduced in size especially how skinny the tree branches look in the jpeg., likely a jpeg artifact. We tend to focus more on branches that are silhouetted against the sky first. But the raw image just lacked contrast.
Looking at the colours between especially the yellows and reds, the raw is accurate, the colour in the jpeg are artifacts. In fact the bands closest to the trees as far as i can tell are jpeg artifacts, except for the yellow.. There was none of that in the sky. But if you look at the gradations of colour in the raw, the jpeg representation is vastly superior, and that to me is probably the most important part of the image.
Using the red cabin to the left to determine exposure they are pretty much equal, the differences are in the post processing applied in camera to the jpeg image.
Sorry most don't get the blue, but, I prefer colour to black and grey. And for those who don't know, shadows have a much higher concentration of blue light. Having white balanced snow in the shadows would actually be the incorrect rendering in this case if reality has any thing to do with it.. In any case white balance was done on the metallic grey of yjr foremost dock.
I realize many put what is in my opinion an over emphasis on white balance, but this has been quite the eye opener. You guys do know that white balanced shadows are actually unnatural don't you? It amaze me when people use separate white balance on different parts of image, then consider their image true to life.
"I don't shoot how it looks,. I shoot how it feels." Colours can express that. Blue for cold almost always works.
The one thing that the jpeg was better at IMHO was the dock, bottom right. There was nothing I could do to match the metallic grey in the raw, and as noted there was nothing I could do to improve the definition of the tree. But bottom line, I could have made the raw look like the jpeg, I couldn't make the jpeg look like the raw.
It seems to be the consensus here that my processing faked everyone out, that being said, the points I make are clearly visible and I could easily highlight them with a circled image. But for me, the tip offs which one was raw were all there. Richer more nuanced colour, better shadow detail, much of the branches in the raw are just black blotches. on the jpeg.
As for so many preferring the grey image, that's a hard one to wrap my head around. We put so much emphasis on reflection colour, the reflections in the raw in terms of colour are just a whole different class than the jpeg. You don't really get colour contrast from grey. Interesting that so many focussed on the willow tree as opposed to the sunset where I was at a complete loss to both match my selected cabins and also produce any semblance of accurate colour in the jpeg. Nor was I able to darken the jpeg to closer match the raw image, without increasing the size of the black blotches of black shadow among the fir tree branches.
I was quite interested to know how many could actually pick up the signs of raw vs jpeg or understood what kinds of things you can do with raws you can't do with jpeg, and when you might as well shoot jpeg
Thanks again for your participation. It's been informative.