[MJB DIGITAL]

Hey guys.
Picture yourself at the reception. You have been shooting all day, and by your estimations, you are getting close to having shot 700 photos and its time to take a break.
So you grab some memory cards to see what you shot, go out on the balcony with your fancy wedding soda, fighting off the bridesmaids on the way, and you start checking out what you shot while sipping your pepsi.

...and you discover that one of your cams has been set to shoot JPG ALL DAY!!!
holy crap I have never felt like that before. It's like, 'what have I done?'

Now, when I shoot, I consider whitebalance to be just as important as ISO, f/stop, and shutterspeed. So I float around in my manual WB numbers as well as the other stuff. I don't subscribe to the philosophy that 'you can fix it later' because the shot needs to be perfect every time eh?

THESE JPGS ARE GREAT!! I cant believe it. I love the contrast in JPG's so much more now that I see shots from a camera after it worked all day in JPG. I'm actually glad that I was pumping out the JPG's all day.
The only problem is that I keep my JPG settings at +3 contrast +2 sat and +1 sharpen, so I had to pull that stuff back a little in Lightroom but....what the hell.
Next time I shoot for the studio I shot for last week, I'm going to ask for their blessing to shoot JPG. And I'm going to rock the microphone baby!

8)

...a day in the life of an artist.

[dylansalt]

Myself also.

With so many photo's needing to be shot at an "event" it would take me ages to convert RAW images time after time.

Too be quite honest I cannot (for me anyway) see with "my" eye the benefits gained by shooting raw - I have really tried please believe this - so for me it's jpeg shooting 100% of the time.

Ken Rockwell (love or hate him) feels that shooting raw is way to labour intensive if shooting lots.

d

[ManuH]

Personally I think RAW is much better than JPEG. It has something to do with tonality range but also it's so much easy to fix any exposure problem. And anyway you don't have to choose, you can use RAW+JPEG, it will give you the best of both worlds. If the JPEG is good, keep the JPEG, if not work on the raw file.

[stevebrot]

In general, the in-camera JPEG produces great results. They can be somewhat soft, however. It has something to do with the JPEG rendering algorithm. This was noted in many reviews of the K10D and has been substantiated by 100% crops of comparison shots between in-camera JPEG and RAW.

Having said that, it is my belief that the sharpness difference is probably negligible for most subjects. Other factors such as camera motion, lens sharpness, and less-than-spot-on focus are bigger contributing factors to lack of sharpness.

For my purposes, I will shoot JPEG

• When I need to squeeze a lot of shots onto the flash memory card
• When I know that I am not going to be doing a lot of PP
• When the purpose of the shoot does not demand the maximum level of quality

If a shot comes up that requires what RAW offers, I will use the RAW button.

This approach served me well on a trip to Austria some months ago where I shot 300+ shots, all of which were hand held and most of which were documentary in nature.

Having said that, I have to confess to shooting RAW almost exclusively. The advantages include:

• Access to the full dynamic range of the sensor in PP
• More affective adjustment of white balance in PP
• Access to the full resolution that the sensor offers. (Why buy the great glass, compose on a tripod, and sweat the focus only to have the results degraded by the JPEG conversion?)
• The option of lossless conversion to TIFF format

Steve

[Lowell Goudge]

I have been saying all along, if you understand the JPEG settings, the best way to shoot is to set up your camera for the lighting and just shoot JPEGs.

I have ony shot RAW once, and it was specifically because I was going to crop the center 10% of an image out and print it to 8x10

here it is.
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/208249-post1.html

[pentkon52]

Hey guys.

THESE JPGS ARE GREAT!! I cant believe it.
8)

...a day in the life of an artist.

Well, i have been saying for two years that the jpgs are fine. I rarely shoot raw, and print my jpgs up to 11x14 with no complaints.

Dave

[MShawn63]

I am going to be shooting a benefit marathon walk in October and when I shot it last year I shot every picture in raw and it took me countless hours to convert and process them. I may try jpeg this year to save myself time, but my concern is lighting. I'm on site with the set up team at about 4am and will shoot unitl 5 or 6pm that night. Like a wedding I only get one shot at this and the images are used in our fund raising communications so it's important that they come out.

[silent_eyes]

Hey guys.
Picture yourself at the reception. You have been shooting all day, and by your estimations, you are getting close to having shot 700 photos and its time to take a break.
So you grab some memory cards to see what you shot, go out on the balcony with your fancy wedding soda, fighting off the bridesmaids on the way, and you start checking out what you shot while sipping your pepsi.

...and you discover that one of your cams has been set to shoot JPG ALL DAY!!!
holy crap I have never felt like that before. It's like, 'what have I done?'

Now, when I shoot, I consider whitebalance to be just as important as ISO, f/stop, and shutterspeed. So I float around in my manual WB numbers as well as the other stuff. I don't subscribe to the philosophy that 'you can fix it later' because the shot needs to be perfect every time eh?

THESE JPGS ARE GREAT!! I cant believe it. I love the contrast in JPG's so much more now that I see shots from a camera after it worked all day in JPG. I'm actually glad that I was pumping out the JPG's all day.
The only problem is that I keep my JPG settings at +3 contrast +2 sat and +1 sharpen, so I had to pull that stuff back a little in Lightroom but....what the hell.
Next time I shoot for the studio I shot for last week, I'm going to ask for their blessing to shoot JPG. And I'm going to rock the microphone baby!

8)

...a day in the life of an artist.

fact of life - RAW is better, RAW is forgiving, RAW is nice... RAW takes time, sometimes RAW doesn't give anything more than good old jpg, and most of the time - RAW is for tricky shots where we're not to sure how it will turn out. Histograms help, but they're not always exactly what you would call precise. You can put a lot of post-processing into jpg shots, if used correctly due to jpg compression, but here's the tricky part - some cameras give great jpgs, and some cameras don't. Out-of-the-box settings for k10d are pretty much crap for jpg, compared to nikon d80 which is great, but a bit tweaking gives a lot, really a lot. I use sharpness +3, contrast +1, saturation +2, and I'm happy up to iso400, but iso800 and 1600 are not so good, I get much more detail from RAW, CameraRaw 4.5 works great... Today I took 3 shots, and I didn't get any more sharpness and detail from RAW than from jpg, and after all, this is just pixel peeping, not real photography

[Kerrowdown]

I shoot raw all the time, if you need to gain the maximum quality from your images, it’s the only way to shoot, you have total control of your workflow.

I use CS3 for post process and it has various integral batch / action / droplet command functions, so for me I can automate any raw to jpeg conversions using just a few keystrokes.

You can always go raw to jpeg, but you can never go jpeg to raw.

[silent_eyes]

I shoot raw all the time, if you need to gain the maximum quality from your images, it’s the only way to shoot, you have total control of your workflow.

I use CS3 for post process and it has various integral batch / action / droplet command functions, so for me I can automate any raw to jpeg conversions using just a few keystrokes.

You can always go raw to jpeg, but you can never go jpeg to raw.

this is true, I also almoust always shoot RAW, I did play around with jpg quite few times to check it out, testing and stuff, and if you're in memory-situation, jpg will get you through just fine.
This only applies if you have some experience in photography, histogram reading and stuff, since when shooting jpg - there can be no mistakes. RAW is forgiving, jpg is smaller and gives good enough results for almoust anything, but - you need to know how to shoot jpg with dslr. It's easier to take RAW file and get good results in post-processing than to know how to get spot-on exposure, WB and sharpness, while shooting, learning to recognize all this takes time.

[Kerrowdown]

Just a quick follow on from silent eyes comments:

Memory cards are now relatively cheap, even professional quality ones, I recommend you buy the best you can. I carry a minimum of at least ten 4Gb Sandisk Extreme III (SDHC) cards all the time and their weight is next to nothing and they take little or no space in the pockets or bag.

If your images are important to you like mine are, treat yourself to more cards, you won't regret it, rather than trying to use a compressed shooting medium. This is how film was in the old days, memory cards are the same and should be treated as almost a cheap consumable item and it is false economy to skimp on this. Especially when you consider how much we all spend on our camera bodies and even more on good fast glass. You owe to yourself to obtain the very best possible image from all shooting situations.

It’s not about making mistakes or using a more forgiving medium, as you are already aware, the histogram that appears on a compact camera or digital SLR screen is unreliable for anything other than jpeg capture. This is because the histogram you see there is actually based on the camera processed jpeg and is not representative of the true raw capture. Hence the only way to check the histogram for raw capture is to open the image via a raw processing program such as adobe camera raw or something similar.

In raw you do still need to get the best exposure setting you can at the image capture stage, even bracket exposures as necessary in order to obtain to the ideal correct one. As for white balance, raw captures the light and light quality as it was at the actual exposure time, not a perceived or enhanced version. Sharpness is down to the lens quality, focus and camera operators’ ability to take the shot.

When shooting jpeg this all these are set in camera, with the values you preset or the camera default setting, applied and then compressed with loss, before you even get to see the result on the lcd.

At least with some post process software, CS3 for one you can apply some of Adobe Camera Raw settings and tweaks to jpeg and tiff as well as raw.

[silent_eyes]

Just a quick follow on from silent eyes comments:

Memory cards are now relatively cheap, even professional quality ones, I recommend you buy the best you can. I carry a minimum of at least ten 4Gb Sandisk Extreme III (SDHC) cards all the time and their weight is next to nothing and they take little or no space in the pockets or bag.

If your images are important to you like mine are, treat yourself to more cards, you won't regret it, rather than trying to use a compressed shooting medium. This is how film was in the old days, memory cards are the same and should be treated as almost a cheap consumable item and it is false economy to skimp on this. Especially when you consider how much we all spend on our camera bodies and even more on good fast glass. You owe to yourself to obtain the very best possible image from all shooting situations.

It’s not about making mistakes or using a more forgiving medium, as you are already aware, the histogram that appears on a compact camera or digital SLR screen is unreliable for anything other than jpeg capture. This is because the histogram you see there is actually based on the camera processed jpeg and is not representative of the true raw capture. Hence the only way to check the histogram for raw capture is to open the image via a raw processing program such as adobe camera raw or something similar.

In raw you do still need to get the best exposure setting you can at the image capture stage, even bracket exposures as necessary in order to obtain to the ideal correct one. As for white balance, raw captures the light and light quality as it was at the actual exposure time, not a perceived or enhanced version. Sharpness is down to the lens quality, focus and camera operators’ ability to take the shot.

When shooting jpeg this all these are set in camera, with the values you preset or the camera default setting, applied and then compressed with loss, before you even get to see the result on the lcd.

At least with some post process software, CS3 for one you can apply some of Adobe Camera Raw settings and tweaks to jpeg and tiff as well as raw.

what I meant for forgiving medium is that you can still fix a lot of mistakes using RAW, and preserve top-level image quality, where you'll lose a lot if doing same with jpg, so in case you forget to return EV to 0 - RAW won't mind sure, right exposure is right exposure, no matter if it's raw or jpg, agreed, but there's still way more room to tweak and squeeze with RAW...

I'm sure that anyone who has ever experienced a 500+ shots to post-process is well into batch-processing, so time is of little importance if you know what to do, make adjustments to one shot, synch all others, check every now and then, and that's the beauty of RAW, but jpg still needs a lot more work for each photo since it's more specific...

as far as space comparison issue goes, once I simply forgot all my mem.cards in my other bag, so the only thing I had with me was my 1gb sd card, which was kept in my battery-grip, so I switched to jpg and got through the assignement...

histograms make no sense if you're shooting raw, but you can't really go without them in jpgs, especially with tricky lighting, at least I can't with my k10d... again, I'm still for RAW, but - if you're in some kind of trouble or really need to go with jpg for any reason - it's not such a bad thing, just need a bit more attention

[MJB DIGITAL]

Awesome, it's a good discussion. 8)

I shoot RAW %100 of the time and will continue to do so. That is for professional jobs, at least.
I shoot my family in jpg unless it is a specific request for a portrait.

This is how I think about it:

When you shoot RAW, you have the enitre raw image data, and you take that to the computer and process your digital negatives in software that is devoted image processing.

When you shoot JPG, the camera takes your RAW file and processes it according to your settings and throws out about %80 of the image file. That leaves you with a not-so-forgiving photo to work with.

If anyone doesnt know, Adobe Lightroom will process JPG files exactly like RAW files. You can slide the color temp slider over, as well as fill light and sat and everything. But you still find your noise.

The program costs about 200 bucks I think and is great. I can do about 100 photos/hour in LR.

[stevebrot]

When you shoot JPG, the camera takes your RAW file and processes it according to your settings and throws out about %80 of the image file...

That is the crux of the matter. If you shoot JPEG you are irreversibly discarding both dynamic range and resolution.

...If anyone doesnt know, Adobe Lightroom will process JPG files exactly like RAW... files.

Yes, LR processes JPEG the same as RAW. However, it has a lot less to work with when the source is JPEG. I am not sure about the equivalence of white balance biasing. I may have been mistaken in my earlier post.

Steve

[silent_eyes]

Awesome, it's a good discussion. 8)

If anyone doesnt know, Adobe Lightroom will process JPG files exactly like RAW files. You can slide the color temp slider over, as well as fill light and sat and everything. But you still find your noise.

The program costs about 200 bucks I think and is great. I can do about 100 photos/hour in LR.

I'm not so sure about this one, Lightroom does process JPGs in same way as it does RAW, but - there is nothing to process in jpg files, so you actually end up with some pretty bad looking results, I'm not reffering to WB or color in general, but for options like "fill light", contrast, or squeezing +1.5EV from jpg, which is perfectly normal with RAW... Range is very, very limited in jpg, I'd say it's like comparing c41 negatives with e6, once e6 is taken - it's taken, you can still play around a bit, but that's it.