Originally posted by biz-engineer If I understood (finally) correctly, JPEG was designed to web display.
JPEG was given to us complements of NASA and predates the Internet. That being said, it is very useful for publishing compressed continuous tone content to the Web and has been a mainstay for photos since the very beginning. JPEG has limitations, but is more than adequate for most of the devices and monitors on which the content is being viewed.
Originally posted by RGlasel RAW is just another example of doublespeak, it creates an illusion of complete control for the camera user, but the reality is not so clear.
Perhaps not doublespeak, but there is a lot of truth in your statement. A few mornings ago, I was testing a new lens under light overcast on some flowers in my back yard. I was shooting DNG and the rear LCD showed some fairly pleasing results. When I imported into Lightroom, the colors were not quite right. Obviously, auto WB was having trouble and conventional wisdom is that since I was shooting DNG (no WB applied to the actual capture data) this should be easily managed in PP. Yes, Lightroom will apply the camera's best guess from the file metadata; no, making a suitable correction would not be easy. Even without having to work around imposed JPEG rendering, the hard facts regarding the sensor response* to each of the elements in the first scene (lavender-colored flowers with yellow and grass-green in the background) meant that a simple shift in color temp (WB) and tint would fall far short regardless of gamut width, calibrations, and sophistication of tools.
In short, more than one pigment is at work in the flower petals and even with a color-managed workflow at all steps, embedded profiles, and due diligence by me, some viewers of the flowers in the final JPEG will see lavender, some magenta, and some cornflower blue, depending on the JPEG rendering engine used by the viewer software (usually a browser) and the display being used.
I did my best, but there are physical limits imposed by the hardware that I cannot overcome. Perhaps Foveon or maybe Ektar 100 might do better. This is just one area where control is limited. The other is managing contrast with limited bit-depth in the shadows.
What color flowers do you see?
Tritelia laxa (Ithuriel's Spear), Pentax K-3, Lester A. Dine 105/2.8 Macro
FWIW, there is a second set of photos of another flower that I have never successfully gotten decent color rendering of using digital capture. I am thinking that adding a frame with gray card or colorchecker (for a custom import profile) might be a better approach.
Steve
* I lay the blame on narrow band-pass filters used by the Bayer array and/or limitations of Lightroom's image processor and import profiles. I do have similar issues with other tools, however.