[GUB]

This.
RAW is only as good as the person who processes it, JPEG is only as good as the person who sets the camera*.

*I mean WRT in-camera jpeg-specific options, like highlight and shadow recovery, lens corrections, color profile, contrast, saturation, WB...

Yes and that is another reason I like raw - I am not smart enough to get the settings right in the heat of the moment. Much easier to muddle over the settings later in the comfort of your chair.

[reh321]

I like both - the photographer did a good job, which is Job One.
I never zoom in to inspect shots .... I believe a photo should be viewed as a finished product from a distance where I can see the entire image.

I've already spent a lifetime in front of a computer, so I'd rather spend any remaining time out in the field.

Since I used Kodachrome in the days of film, this is just a continuation of how I have always operated.

[reh321]

Yes and that is another reason I like raw - I am not smart enough to get the settings right in the heat of the moment. Much easier to muddle over the settings later in the comfort of your chair.

It is not a matter of "being smart".
Having shot Kodachrome, I developed habits that result in the photo I want without any further 'muddling' in the discomfort of a room - dark or light.

Over the past forty years of marriage, my wife has become accustomed to the fact that a "five minute photo stop" may actually take thirty minutes.
To me, the biggest disappointment is the person who takes a quick shot, and then the next day discovers an issue, such as something in the way, that could have been fixed by a quick adjustment in the field, but is now real work to fix {if it can be fixed at all}.

[PDL]

Actually, both images are JPEG's so your point/poll is moot.

What would be interesting is to have two photo's one using JPEG in camera with all JPEG engine values set to 0 and another image saved as RAW. Sort of like shooting in RAW+.

Then with the RAW's open them in different RAW converters and export them as JPEG's with no post processing steps, just what the RAW processors default profile provides. Then do the comparison. That would be a interesting "poll" and just for giggles put a Color Checker matrix down in the corner, just to see what visible differences would show up.

I bet you that LR, Capture One, DCU, Darktable, Affinity Photo, RawTherapee (throw what ever RAW converter/image processor into the mix) would show a reasonable variation on a theme. That would be a reasonable poll to participate, although the "I like this best" is more of an opinion question rather than RAW vs JPEG.

Full disclosure, I did not vote for anything as to not skew any results.

---------- Post added 11-20-18 at 05:19 PM ----------

It is not a matter of "being smart".
Having shot Kodachrome, I developed habits that result in the photo I want without any further 'muddling' in the discomfort of a room - dark or light.

Over the past forty years of marriage, my wife has become accustomed to the fact that a "five minute photo stop" may actually take thirty minutes.
To me, the biggest disappointment is the person who takes a quick shot, and then the next day discovers an issue, such as something in the way, that could have been fixed by a quick adjustment in the field, but is now real work to fix {if it can be fixed at all}.

Back in the day, Kodachrome 25 was one of my most favored emulsions. I worked at a place that had provided (according to managers) 5 day processing, but we would usually get 1-2 days. Since I was the film guy behind the counter, I would separate out my slides first so that was a lot of fun and I would order a reasonably large number of rolls of film (read same batch with identical emulsion numbers) and get my employee 10% discount. Ahh - the good old year.

One of the benefits of shooting slide film was the narrowness of "proper" exposure. What you shot was what you got, there was very little/no post processing of the image. This is why National Geographic required Slide (transparencies, chromes etc.) film to be used and handed back to the Society unprocessed. They wanted to ensure that the photographer was not "cheating" and got the image right in the first place. Along with my father I developed slide film (chromes E6), color/black and white negatives and printed slides on Cibachrome. There was very little dodging an burning with color images because you had to do everything in darkness except expose the paper and it was expensive. Also if you varied the exposure you would introduce color shifts due to the way color papers react to light. (I still have the enlarger - Besler 23C with a dichroic head and a few enlarging lenses ranging from a Vivitar to a el Nikkor f2.8 50mm)

When I started shooting digital it was just like shooting chromes. Expose for the highlights - same philosophy. The big difference is the ability to work out the subtle variations/issues with the image that just were not there back in the film days. Now, would I go back to film? Yes, I still have most if not all of my film cameras and every once in a while the 4x5 monorail can be heard calling my name. I just do not have a place to develop the film - that is the issue. (sorry got a little off topic here)

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Last edited by PDL; 11-20-2018 at 06:22 PM.

[Larrymc]

Yesterday was a challenging day for light. Grey, but one strip just over the horizon that looked like a sunset hung around all day. It took a RAW+ jpeg exposure. I did my best to create the best image from both the raw and the jpeg. So did Tess. Here are the results. I wasn't concerned with what I did to eat image, I was concerned with what can I accomplish with a given file using my PP software. (Aperture). Hence, I'm not really discussing what I hd to do to each one. Only what could be accomplished with each one. This is a typical, expose for the sky , rescue the shadows type of image.

I chose the first image as the RAW file and I like the first image best. Regardless or the various other problems the image has snow should look like snow. I can't imagine the K-1 taking a photo like #2 especially using the Multi Auto White Balance setting, I think my 5 year old K-3 would handle that scene using MAWB setting. Norm, what white balance setting were you using?

[normhead]

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.

[BigMackCam]

I asked four simple questions. Thanks to all who answered. Carry on.

Fair enough, Norm I was trying to be helpful. Apologies if I missed the mark. I'll step out of the thread (as a contributor)...

[reh321]

I feel sorry for the poor flattened tree and the poor blue shadows - being able to pp white balance and correct details of the exposure is really the key to good post processing, in my view.

To be honest, the blue tint of shadowed snow doesn't both me at all - because from many years of photographing snow {and we have lots of opportunity to do that} I repeatedly saw that effect from slide film - perhaps less dramatically, but it was there. I believe it is real - our brains are wonderful things, and are able to do a form of "white balance" to make us see what we know must be there - but shadowed / shaded / overcast light really is bluish. Since I know that snow normally is really white, I could live with the first variant also.

edit: I wrote this before reading Norm's explanation - I didn't remember there was a second page to this thread

[reh321]

A problem with "unsupervised" in-camera JPEG is that it can provide ruthless WB. In 2014 I took my Canon Elph to the Madrigal Dinner put on by the college where my wife works; part way through the dinner, she leaned over and whispered "Those aren't right". After a few minutes of whispered conversation, I understood the issue. The producers of the dinner had gone to considerable lengths to turn a student lounge into a medieval dining hall, including simulating lighting by candles, but the WB built into my camera was "fixing" the WB. A few weeks later I purchased a Q-7, figuring this was one time I would have to start with 'raw' and 'develop' the images myself; however, at the 2015 dinner I discovered that the "candlelight" SCN delivered photos that accurately rendered what we were seeing.

[GUB]

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.

Yes agreed but that is the technical view - out there our brain tend to filter out that blue and see white snow, but we are confronted with it as a cast in a technically correct image. Another example would be the portrait of a pale person out on a lawn. Do we leave the green chin in because it is technically correct or do we correct it to how our minds would interpret it.

[stevebrot]

#1 will be a lot easier to deal with in the post-process for me. Therefore I like it more, and I think it is a raw file.

Remember, you are looking at the end result, not the starting point.


Steve

[leekil]

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.

Apparently I got here too late to vote before you revealed it, but I picked it as #1 JPEG, #2 RAW, #1 better. It seemed like it was probably a sort of trick question in the sense that the "more obvious" one to be the RAW would be #1. But I don't think the JPEG engine one a regular setting would give you colors that were that bright in #2, plus I did notice the additional detail brought out in the tree trunk.

I would also say that independent of what tint the snow should have, in the RAW-processed image, it seems that there is too much blue in the shadows of the trees on the right-hand side of the photo.

[DeadJohn]

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 felt the same way, and only voted for which I liked, not guessing which one was raw vs jpg.

[stevebrot]

What would be interesting is to have two photo's one using JPEG in camera with all JPEG engine values set to 0 and another image saved as RAW. Sort of like shooting in RAW+.

That sounds very good, but may prove frustrating.

Images are never saved as RAW in that RAW capture data is fundamentally non-viewable without being converted to pixel data in memory with possibility of being written to file (e.g. JPEG). With RAW+, the only image created is the one rendered to JPEG and that having being made according to the best efforts of the team that wrote the code used for both in-camera and with PDCU RAW processing.

If using PDCU for RAW processing, the first pass results will be virtually identical to the in-camera JPEG* when doing RAW+ minus information lost in moving from 14 to 8 bits. Try a different RAW converter and the first pass results will provide contrast between RAW converters and little more. (FWIW, I tried this just prior to posting.)


Steve

* First configure PDCU to process the RAW for the "Browse" view rather than using the embedded JPEG from the DNG/PEF file. This allows for easy comparison.

[stevebrot]

Number one is the jpeg.

Yep...the EXIF spills the beans. Pentax dSLRs do not write the SceneType tag for RAW files, but is present for JPEG with the value "1" which translates to "Directly photographed".


Steve