[DafTekno]

Hi Pentaxuals,

I'm trying to figure out how to get the best out of RAW photo files.

I often take shots I deem as good in JPG & RAW, but when I edit the RAW photos (up until now, in Develper Studio 3.0 LE), I struggle to see what all the fuss is about.
Nothing appears to be any different to working with the JPG version.


The only exception being when working with a RAW photo, Developer Studio 3.0 would give me an extra selection in the Contrast list: "Standard".
This would bring out extra detail that would otherwise be invisible.

In fact, THIS is the only thing I've yet seen working with RAW files that is better than just working with JPG's.
No matter how much I alter exposure / contrast / colour / etc. settings, I can't seem to bring out any more details in a photo taken as RAW instead of JPG.
This "Standard" Contrast setting in Developer Studio 3.0 LE is the ONLY time I've found an extra setting made available when using RAW, and it indeed adds a little extra depth & detail.

But that's it!
So I'm trying hard to understand what the big deal is with RAW and why I should be using it more often.

There's got to be something else!
I must be missing something here.

And if you end up saving the end results of your editing as a JPG anyway, for printing or publishing, then what exactly are you gaining by having a RAW file photo?
Wouldn't this end up crushing your beautifully evolving Sky colour into several JPG steps?
Unless the end result is a TIFF, but I hear they're incredibly big files, so are rarely used.

So, clearly, there's something I don't understand here, in relation to RAW files.
Which isn't really a Photo Editor discussion, but is kind of related, I feel.

Maybe there's a stock type of photo I can take to highlight RAW's higher potential inside an editing program.
Maybe some RAW editing programs offer more / better RAW processing than others.

Unless Developer Studio 3.0's "Standard" Contrast is as good as it gets...

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks - D

[tduell]

I only shoot raw, but I don't use Developer Studio, so for now I'll just sit back and note the responses...I suspect there will be a few.

Cheers,
Terry

[Mooncatt]

I like to compare RAW vs saving as jpeg to buying a raw steak vs ordering one at a restaurant.

If you buy a raw steak to cook yourself, you have full control over the outcome. You can trim it, season it, cook however want, top it, etc. It takes more work and has a learning curve, but has the potential to be the best steak you could imagine. When you order one at a restaurant, you can make some minor adjustments, but the final result is largely up to the chef. It's not to say the restaurant steak is bad, just that you are letting someone that doesn't even know you do most of the legwork.

It's no different with photography. Saving as a raw file gives you everything to work with, but requires you to manually do the work. Saving as a jpeg lets you adjust a few exposure settings, but the camera does all the work. You can make changes to it for sure in editing, but that's like adding steak sauce after the fact at the restaurant. The sauce may add extra flavor, but can't change the doneness level or subtract any seasonings.

If you are working with good light, the difference in final outcomes may be so similar as to wonder why bother. Where saving as a RAW file really shines is when working with tricky lighting or high ISO with lots of noise. A shot that is severely underexposed because the camera misjudged the scene could have solid black in the shadows due to the compression, leaving you with nothing recoverable. A RAW file of the same shot may allow you to bring out those details in a dedicated RAW editor because it's not a compressed file.

For a good visual example, this article on the K1 has a great little widget. Scroll to the dynamic range section and the first example is a photo of books severely underexposed. It has a slider so you can see before and after being pushed 5 stops. While the article isn't about RAW specifically, it shows how much detail can be recovered from a poor shot. If this were only saved as a jpeg, you may as well have left the lens cap on.

Taking on the DSLR Giants: Fstoppers Reviews the Pentax K-1 Camera | Fstoppers

[bwgv001]

Shooting JPG you rely on the developing engine of the camera; Sure you may choose; they offer many options; but it's done once you saved the file. With RAW you have all the choices. Many RAW developers don't even touch that original file; you can go back as many times as you want and modify.

[HoLun]

shot this squrriel back lit, have to bring up the shadow to see anything.
first pic is what it looks like as shot.
second pic after i bring up the shadows with the raw
third shot I exported the original raw to jpg, no adjustments with 100% quality, to simulate in camera jpg, and then bring up the shadows.
the images are post process with the same adjustments in lightroom

colors looks off and detail is lost in the jpg reprocess.
its fine if you don't need to do anything to the image afterward when you take jpg, but if you need to make big adjustments, its gonna look bad, especially when you need to crop.
thats my experience

[biz-engineer]

RAW: What is it Good For? Absolutely nothing..?

Correcting lens chromatic aberrations and changing the white balance, can hardly be done on jpegs/tiffs.
Raw gives more headroom for adjusting exposure with lesser risk of color banding, although it could be done on jpegs with limited amount of correction.

[leekil]

RAW gives you access to the full-color capability that the camera has. If you are printing, they will look better, though depending on your usage you might not notice. Before I had a camera that would shoot RAW (and before I knew to use it), I definitely printed many pretty good looking photos from JPG from the camera. But there were occasions where significant adjustment was needed, and it was sometimes very difficult with JPGs.

On the flip side, if you only take perfectly exposed photos, and never have need for significant adjustment, then you can save a lot of disk space by only shooting JPG.

[Papa_Joe]

Read the articles "The Making of ..." from the photo contests and you will know.
You can not do that with jpegs.

Latest I found:
The Making of "Mossbrae Falls" - Photo Contests | PentaxForums.com

[kypfer]

RAW: What is it Good For?

RAW is very useful if you're in the habit of not getting the exposure correct when taking the picture and rely on the extended shadow detail in the RAW image to give you "something useful" once you get back to the computer
Having "invested" both time and possibly money getting familiar with a complex and possibly expensive piece of software, it's difficult to admit that the camera could have done it all anyway

Having said that (rather tongue-in-cheek) there are instances, as with HoLun's squirrel, above, where having a RAW available to work from will give superior results from a difficult original.

I consider RAW as an insurance … nice to have if I "need to make a claim", but not necessarily needed for most shots.
"Pushing the boundaries" in a high-contrast or very poorly lit situation, RAW+ every time.
"Once in a lifetime" opportunities … bring on the RAW!
Getting paid for the job … RAW can give the very best opportunities to adjust the final output for the client/employer's requirements, even if they don't meet your own high standards
Stood in a field with the camera on a tripod just waiting for the clouds to appear behind the tree … all the time in the world to get the JPG right first time

Maybe some RAW editing programs offer more / better RAW processing than others.
Unless Developer Studio 3.0's "Standard" Contrast is as good as it gets...
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Take some time to try out the (maligned?) Digital Camera Utility supplied with Pentax cameras.
Different, quirky, cryptic even, but it "speaks the same language" as your Pentax camera, so adjustments made in the one can be easily applied in the other, if required … setting up a User Mode for a specific circumstance, for instance!
DCU is regularly updated to cater for new Pentax lenses or camera updates and is totally backward compatible with all earlier Pentax DSLRs … SATOBI on an original from a *istD? … click, click, done
Horses for courses … YMMV … just my tuppence worth … etc. etc.
Enjoy!

[othar]

For images made with good light (sunny day,...) the differences between jpg and RAW files will be minor, as long as the image is correctly exposed in camera (under- or overexposed images are a different matter).
The advantages of RAW files are more easily spotted with night photography and other low-light situations like indoors with potentially lots of different light sources. Apart from the greater details you can recover from underexposed areas of an image, does a RAW file also allow you to change the white balance of an image after you took the shot (this can be especially useful when you changed WB at a night shooting and forget to change it back to auto-WB on the next day ).

Images with a broad dynamic range (nightshots with spots of light from street lanterns, harsh sunlight combined with dark shadows,...) can be done with a single exposure when using RAW, while it would require multiple exposures to capture the scene in a jpg file (either by directly creating an HDR image in camera, or by using exposure bracketing and combining those files in post)

[Mooncatt]

I guess since no one else has pointed it out yet, great play on words with the thread title.

[nicolpa47]

My original interest in photography came in the 1960s/1970s, and I mostly used slide film. The aim was to take the final image "in the camera", and you tried not to over-expose the image.

After an initial learning period on going digital, I find myself getting best and most consistent results by working in a similar way to how I did with film, but with the advantages of an endless roll of film and instant review. My camera is set up to produce the jpeg results I prefer, and still with a slight bias towards under-exposure.

I am mostly satisfied with the jpeg results, subject to minor tweeks. Where I find the RAW file of great use is those occasions where I have under-exposed the image by too great a margin, where the dynamic range of the image is too great to be fully reflected without adjustment, or where I've been "pushing my luck" in getting any image at all in the prevailing conditions. The ability to drag shadow detail out of dark areas/images can be quite remarkable, as has been demonstrated by others above.

[D1N0]

People listen to mp3 music too and say it is good enough and they don't hear any difference with these so called high resolution uncompressed formats like DSD (what SACD uses).

[GUB]

The jpg exports of modern Pentax cameras are awesome. And for the first few months of working in Raw you tend to compare your results against the jpg for a reality check.
But once you settle into your workflow there is no going back to jpgs - there is far more much power at your fingertips with a Raw image.
Not only that but a few less decisions to make in the heat of the moment when you should be concentrating on your subject.

[microlight]

There are some great responses here. I'd just add that the old GIGO rule applies in this situation - garbage in, garbage out. What I mean is you can only work with what you've got, and with raw images you get everything that the sensor saw so that you have the best chance of getting the maximum from it. You can tell what's going on by looking at the file sizes of a photo file; for example I just checked one that I took last month. My camera is set to record raw and JPGs on different cards, and in this case the raw file was almost 30Mb and the JPG produced in camera being 11Mb at the maximum JPG quality. In other words, the raw file has almost three times as much data to work with than the JPG does. Whether in camera or in post-production, processing into JPG is a lossy process, in this case with some 63% of the original data being discarded by the camera during the creation of the JPG. This is where JPG artifacts come from; because in order to reduce the file size (which was the original design intent for JPG) then the JPG processing has to calculate what to keep and what to throw away using an algorithm. So, much of what you see in a JPG is not what the sensor put there, and in guessing what to keep and what to discard, the processing sometimes gets it wrong. Trying then to further process a JPG means that you're then potentially amplifying the errors introduced during the JPG creation process.

There's a parallel here with audio files, where raw would be equivalent to WAV, and JPG to MP3. The MP3 algorithm decides what the listener can or cannot hear, and removes sound data accordingly, so that even with the best quality MP3, you get only roughly a quarter of the original audio data. And you get processing artifacts here also, in the form of a level of dullness and 'listener fatigue' that you don't get with a WAV. If you don't think that you get listener fatigue listening to MP3s, try it with a four-hour Wagner opera! (You might get fatigue for other reasons, but that's another story!)


I would think that the majority of photos end up as JPGs (mine do), so ultimately, for me it's a question of how, but importantly when you get there. To me, the creation of a JPG is the last thing I do to an image. If I am dissatisfied and want something slightly different, I won't edit the JPG, I'll go back to my raw processor which has retained all the modifications that I made, and make another one. I look at it like this. I learned the basics of photography and enlarging and printing in the late 60s/early 70s, and printed all my own monochromes up to the 90s. To me, in-camera JPGs are the film equivalent of taking a roll of film to the chemist's shop and collecting the prints a day or so later; they are what they are. Raw files however are like producing your own prints at home - DNG after all was derived from 'digital negative'. If you're happy with the JPG output of the camera and do no further processing then that's absolutely fine; it does what you want. Further processing though would be like taking a processed photo print and re-photographing it in order to be able to process it further - but you can't replace what's not there any more. If the JPG process has removed for example the bulk of the sky information in a photo because to the processing algorithm it all looks very similar, then no amount of further processing will put it back. With a raw image, you still have that information, and good processing can bring out features that you may not have seen.

Given two JPGs then, one out of camera and the other post-processed from raw, it becomes a choice of whether you want control over your final JPG - and can create another, different one if you're unhappy with it - or whether you're happy to let the machine do it, but not be able to reproduce the original data if you have the camera set to JPG only. Neither is wrong; it's down to personal preference. It does becomes important if you're producing prints (especially big prints) since artifacts will be much more easily visible if made from a JPG. I have a number of hung prints at home, but these were generated from lossless TIFF files. If however, like me, the bulk of what you take is viewed - and edited - on a standard high-definition monitor, then we are not seeing the full quality of what our cameras are giving us in any case! A HD screen is a hair over 2 megapixels (1920x1080) in resolution whereas my K-3II provides 24 megapixels (6000x4000) of resolution. So my ultimate argument for why I prefer raw shooting and processing is that because we're only screen-viewing a fraction of what quality is available from a modern sensor, it makes sense to me to provide the HD window that I'm writing this on, with the best possible quality of source material. That's all.