[OregonJim]

Every time you open/edit/save a JPEG, you lose some image detail due to the lossy compression. You can adjust a RAW file 'till the cows come home and still retain the original detail.

[ftpaddict]

Every time you open/edit/save a JPEG, you lose some image detail due to the lossy compression. You can adjust a RAW file 'till the cows come home and still retain the original detail.

But Ken doesn't need that, and neither should you.

[OregonJim]

But Ken doesn't need that, and neither should you.

Hey, if it's good enough for Ken, it's good enough for me. All hail the Ken!

[Arpe]

For some people, Ken Rokwell may be entirely right. I shot using raw with my K20D for about six months last year, only to realize I was wasting my time since I never really needed to color correct beyond what the camera would have already done with JPEG in the first place or beyond what I can do with most image editors. At this point, since I just don't have a lot of time to waste, I'm back to using JPEG.

stewart

Whereas I did the opposite! I always used jpegs til about a year ago, but got sick of having the wrong WB especially, which can be impossible to correct on jpeg. Now I'm raw mainly just for the WB correction.

I think the point is that you can do a lot of what you can with RAW files with JPG, it just isn't necessarily going to come out as well.

I agree.

[pingflood]

Every time you open/edit/save a JPEG, you lose some image detail due to the lossy compression. You can adjust a RAW file 'till the cows come home and still retain the original detail.

Depends on what you use. Lightroom does non-destructive editing to both RAWs and JPEGs. Besides, when are you adjust the _actual_ RAW file?

[stewart_photo]

Every time you open/edit/save a JPEG, you lose some image detail due to the lossy compression. (snip)

That's a red herring, OregonJim, since no knowledgeable person in his or her right mind repeatedly edits and saves JPEG files. In my case, both raw and JPEG files are converted into lossless Photoshop files on the very first save. Those images remain in that format until the final use is determined, at which point a copy is saved in the format needed for that use.

stewart

[stewart_photo]

(snip) ..got sick of having the wrong WB especially, which can be impossible to correct on jpeg. (snip)

This has been discussed many times on this forum, so I'm certainly not going to get drawn into a long discussion again. However, I will just quickly say there are tools within Photoshop, and most other comprehensive image editors, which allows one to easily correct for WB mistakes in an image, regardless of the file format that image is saved in.

In my case, I just take the time while shooting to avoid WB mistakes. Been doing that for decades, so certainly no unusually difficult task with digital.

stewart

[OregonJim]

That's a red herring, OregonJim, since no knowledgeable person in his or her right mind repeatedly edits and saves JPEG files. In my case, both raw and JPEG files are converted into lossless Photoshop files on the very first save. Those images remain in that format until the final use is determined, at which point a copy is saved in the format needed for that use.

stewart

Well, not really a red herring, since you're already STARTING with lost detail if your source is a JPEG.

True, a knowledgeable person will immediately convert to TIFF or PSD to prevent further loss.

[WMBP]

Gosh, I'm trying to remember how long it's been since I've read a good raw vs jpeg thread. Been a while. But no question stays answered for ever. A few points (nothing new).

Let me first note that you're shooting raw whether you want to or not. That's what the camera does. The question isn't, should you shoot raw, it's whether you should let the camera's itty bitty brain do the conversion to jpeg or whether you'd prefer to let your computer's big brain do it. Remember, that if the camera does it, it makes the decision about the right conversion and throws away everything it doesn't think is necessary. If you convert on the computer, you throw nothing away.

Now, there are really only three drawbacks to shooting raw these days: 1, raw files are bigger; 2, because they're bigger, raw files take a little longer to write to disk, and this matters occasionally to some sports shooters; and 3, raw files almost always require at least a little post-processing, where, if you're lucky, your jpegs might require very little. Drawback #2 doesn't affect me and I regard #1 and #3 as trivial problems, considering the advantage of having all the raw data to work with. But that's my take, and it's not unreasonable to regard these drawbacks as non-trivial for your own purposes.

Finally, the reason that folks like Ken Rockwell and others can get away shooting jpeg is that, while raw unquestionably gives you more latitude, the practical fact is that in-camera conversion to jpeg is usually pretty good. If you generally shoot in good light and generally nail your exposures, then perhaps the slight advantages of converting to jpeg in camera outweight the advantages of saving your raw capture files.

Me, I shoot raw, 99.9% of the time.

Will

[Paul Hunt]

Can you recover highlights with jpeg?

Sometimes I chuckle at folk who vigorously espouse the virtues of raw, such as fine-grain control and 16-bit precision. Then they happily proceed to batch-process 400 raw images with "recipe" presets. I can laugh, because I do it myself...

Paul

[pingflood]

Gosh, I'm trying to remember how long it's been since I've read a good raw vs jpeg thread. Been a while. But no question stays answered for ever. A few points (nothing new).

Let me first note that you're shooting raw whether you want to or not. That's what the camera does. The question isn't, should you shoot raw, it's whether you should let the camera's itty bitty brain do the conversion to jpeg or whether you'd prefer to let your computer's big brain do it. Remember, that if the camera does it, it makes the decision about the right conversion and throws away everything it doesn't think is necessary. If you convert on the computer, you throw nothing away.

Now, there are really only three drawbacks to shooting raw these days: 1, raw files are bigger; 2, because they're bigger, raw files take a little longer to write to disk, and this matters occasionally to some sports shooters; and 3, raw files almost always require at least a little post-processing, where, if you're lucky, your jpegs might require very little. Drawback #2 doesn't affect me and I regard #1 and #3 as trivial problems, considering the advantage of having all the raw data to work with. But that's my take, and it's not unreasonable to regard these drawbacks as non-trivial for your own purposes.

Finally, the reason that folks like Ken Rockwell and others can get away shooting jpeg is that, while raw unquestionably gives you more latitude, the practical fact is that in-camera conversion to jpeg is usually pretty good. If you generally shoot in good light and generally nail your exposures, then perhaps the slight advantages of converting to jpeg in camera outweight the advantages of saving your raw capture files.

Me, I shoot raw, 99.9% of the time.

Will

I shoot RAW+JPEG (large, highest quality), and there's a reason for that. I love Lightroom overall, and it's a fantastic program. With some substantial effort I can really make an image sing from the RAW file. However, the JPEGs generally come out of the camera looking pretty damned good, and no preset or profile I've tried (including building my own) can quite replicate the in-camera JPEG. I am glad to have RAW for the few images where I really need the extra data, but on the rest, it's nice to have a good looking JPEG ready to go whether for resizing or print or whatnot.

Yes, I could use Canon's DPP program to convert the RAW files into JPEG but all it really does is mimic what happens in-camera. And I'd still have a RAW and a JPEG to futz with later, since DPP doesn't have a good workflow like Lightroom does.

Summary: for most shoots I could either import the stuff and use the JPEGs or sit around and futz with the RAW files for hours. So why not use JPEGs for most and keep the RAWs for when needed?

[WMBP]

Can you recover highlights with jpeg?

Sure, and you can blow highlights completely even if you're shooting raw. Proper exposure is always. Raw just gives you more data to work with. This is useful not just for fixing problems but also for getting the most out of well-exposed shots.

Sometimes I chuckle at folk who vigorously espouse the virtues of raw, such as fine-grain control and 16-bit precision. Then they happily proceed to batch-process 400 raw images with "recipe" presets. I can laugh, because I do it myself...

Hey, nothing wrong with this. I wish I could get away with this. Batch processing on your computer is a little more difficult than letting the camera do it, but only a little. And when the computer does it, if you don't like the results, you can undo it and try again. Or you can batch process 400 images, accept the results for 300 of them, then reset the other 100 and hand-process them.

Will

[Gooshin]

open question...

why is it that writing an unedited raw file to disk takes longer than compressing that same file prior to writing it to disk?

[bwield]

The only thing I can think of is just the sheer size... Though one might expect the processing of the image to be a longer process...

[Sean Nelson]

why is it that writing an unedited raw file to disk takes longer than compressing that same file prior to writing it to disk?

Because the CPU is about a million times faster than the disk drive. So the time it takes to do the compression is trivial compared to the time required to write the data to disk, and since the compressed file is a lot smaller it takes a lot less disk time to write it.

I'm not making the "million" up, by the way. The time to access data in the CPU's caches is measured in nanoseconds (1/1,000,000,000 sec), while the time to access data on a disk drive is measured in milliseconds (1/1000 sec). That's a factor of a million times difference in speed.