Taking RAW photographs - is it worth it

isofa

Marty_J wrote: »

You can change the white balance, exposure, and sharpening of a JPEG image. While JPEG is a lossy format, it uses a mixture of both lossy and lossless compression. Re-saved JPEGs can show little or no quality loss, especially if the JPG is saved in-camera at the highest quality setting, and saved again at the highest setting. Even when re-saved at 50% quality, it's very hard to tell the difference without viewing the image at 100%. It's a very efficient file format.

Oh, and Nikon cameras come with Nikon ViewNX for processing RAW files. It's not exactly full-featured, but it's there.

I disagree. (althas is dead right, agree with all his points).

You cannot accurately and non destructively alter the white balance of any image file, other than RAW or DNG. JPEG compared with a RAW file - it's just not a comparison. In fact it's often impossible to get "white right" in a poor white balance JPEG.

The RAW file allows you to change the attributes based on the original sensor data, to then produce a final image, as if it were retaken with those attributes, you cannot ever do this with a JPEG file (nor anything other than RAW or DNG), there isn't the data available to start with.

Sure, you can change the levels, brightness/contrast, curve etc but you cannot do this non-destructively, nor effectively re-take the photo.

Re-saved JPEGs do show lower quality. Anyone working on a JPEG and who keeps resaving until the end will have a much lower quality image than someone using lossless formats until the very last stage, artefacting is introduced all the time when JPEGs are resaved. The only lossless alterations that are possible on a JPEG are limited block transformations/rotations which aren't the preserve of photo-editing.

Perhaps I'm fussy, but I can tell the difference of a JPEG at 50% quality and one at near maximum - but then I've been working with digital imaging for 15+ years, and some of my work today is in the pro-photography arena.

Nikon cameras do come with that, and in my opinion it useless! I've never met any who uses it, nor rates it. The Canon software is much better and fully featured (and free), but Capture One and Photoshop's ACR make mincemeat out of both. It's a common gripe of Nikon owners that users are expected people to pay more for a featured RAW package. It crops up often in the photography press.

Marty_J

OK, here are two photos:





You can click each for the full size one. The top one was taken as a RAW file, the bottom was a JPEG. When taking the photo, I deliberately underexposed by setting the exposure compensation to -1, and I also deliberately totally screwed up the white balance. The camera did a pretty good job of getting it right, so I changed it to the shade setting. The JPEG had a small amount of sharpening applied in-camera. Both photos were taken with an aperture of f/1.8 and a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second. I forgot to turn off the Auto ISO, and the camera used a higher ISO for the JPEG, so it'll have more noise. The original RAW file was 5.2 MB in size, and the original JPEG was 2.1 MB.

I loaded both into Adobe Photoshop Elements on my Mac, and had a quick play around with them in order to get them looking similar. Both the RAW and the JPEG file were then resaved as JPEGs at 100% quality (so the one that started life as a JPEG was compressed twice).

The RAW recovered detail in the highlights better as you'd expect, and the blacks looks a bit better as a result of me having to drastically change the colour in the JPEG version (it's mostly noticeable at the top of poor Darcy's head); the higher ISO also doesn't help, though that's my fault. This is all worst case scenario stuff though; I deliberately tried to balls up taking the picture so I'd have the edit the JPEG as much as possible. If I had taken the photos properly, there would be little or no difference between the two.

And just for kicks, I reopened the file that has already been saved as a JPEG twice, and resaved it at 50% quality, taking it to a grand total of three times round the compression merry-go-round. It's now 480 KB in size, and looks almost identical to me:

Sput2001

RAW is great, but the average day to day home user would probably find it a bit of a faff. If you're in that category, a high resolution jpeg should be fine.

It really depends on what kind of pictures you're taking and for what purpose...

pogofish

chickmug wrote: »

Good point as I see from the user manual downloaded this option is available

Depends on the model but IME, a lot of cameras iwith this mode only set the jpeg at a fairly middling quality.

I swap between the two - Handheld in low light is certainly the preserve of RAW but a lot of general snaps don't need the extra space and quality overhead.

Rather than using the expensive RAW editors or plugins - free ones don't always give you full quality, I am fond of this package, Raw Therapee:

http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Although shareware, it can be downlloaded free and tried without timelimit or crippled functions.

isofa

Marty_J wrote: »

OK, here are two photos: <snip>

Only a quick cursory glace, the difference between pic 1 and pic 2 is very clear, pic 1 has reasonably accurate colours, but pic 2is way out, all the blacks and fur are blue and purple, and there is a green tinge in the fur too - it's colour cast and if this is after adjustment it just goes to prove the lack of power with a incorrectly shot JPEG.

As for the third pic, haven't got time to look at the full res ones, but I suspect you are achieving a similar quality in the JPEG re compression because most of the compression is happening in the blurred fabric behind, this is where most of the space saving is being made. Shoot a complex scene with much more detail and a large depth of field and artefacting would be more evident.

There is quite a bit of noise (and the ISO isn't really that high, wouldn't expect to see that creeping in until 800 +), and also chroma noise, especially in the 2nd and 3rd images.

Shooting in "shade" isn't really getting the white balance terribly wrong, but it's clear to see it's totally incorrect even after the tweaking. Shoot with a tunsten at daylight, or a custom white balance well off, then try and correct with JPEG = impossible.

I've seen "professionals" add a custom white balance for indoor, forget it's active, shoot outside a couple more shots, and have a set of ruined JPEGs, do this with RAW - no issue at all, just change the colour temp in the RAW file and export as TIFF/JPEG whatever.

Marty_J

As I said above, that's what happens when you try and screw something up. It's far easier just to not screw it up in the first place. The differences aren't vast, and I'm sure I could have made the JPEG look better if I had spent a bit more time on it.

Reviewing your images and paying attention to what you're doing is far easier than editing a RAW file. Even a correctly shot RAW needs processed, whereas a correctly shot JPEG does not. Personally, I much prefer taking photos than I do trying to fix them.

Here's a much better comparison:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d200/quality-settings.htm

a.hamilton123

Ultimately it comes down to patience and disk space.

I take so many photos, that the disk space to save them all in raw and JPG would be silly, especially as I use the highest quality on my camera.

Instead, I put faith in good photography to pull me thorough.

Also, I try to limit my editing to 1 minute per photo, so if it is that wrong, i just ignore it

isofa

I guess it's down to opinion and how you like to take pictures. And how you like to edit. Post processing is a skill, not a cheat, if done correctly. New technology, embrace it!

Storage isn't an issue, it's so cheap nowadays that for £70 you've got a 1Tb drive. I take many hundreds if not thousands of images a month!

Personally I want to squeeze every inch out of a photoshoot, and being skilled behind the lens AND with RAW and digital retouching can give the edge.

It's not about wheeling out all the effects or being careless, it's about knowing and selecting the right tools for the job. A guy I was working with recently, has won several Fuji and top Wedding Photographer of the Year awards, and everything he shoots is RAW from his camera, and everything goes through a RAW workflow, his pictures are outstanding.

Some top end cameras produce better quality files RAW than JPEG, some the opposite, but it's often to do with the sharpening algorithms, you have more control with RAW.

The main problem with digital is poor white balance (Nikon are generally cool, Canon generally warm). Lower end cameras (Dxxs, EOS xxxDs) etc suffer from other issues too, which is why there is such a leap from consumer to semi-pro to again full-frame pro.

A proper RAW workflow isn't complex at all, you'll get better dynamic range, you can output to 16-bit TIFFs for work or large format printing (much of my printing goes direct to TIFF, rather than JPEG - zero loss of quality), many things you just can't achieve with a compress JPEG out of the camera.

What about B+W, top quality B+W will be RAW, with adjustments made in LAB, then channels select for a conversion, not some clumsy and auto colour to B+W change, which will lose much of the contrasty changes crucial to B+W.

I personally shoot JPEG a lot of the time, but for crucial things, such as weddings (where white balance and exposure fooling the camera are common problems; even for the most expericed), I shoot in both. I might use 20 or 30 RAW files or more, but with minor tweaks, not huge leaps in exposure.

I don't think editing a RAW file is complex, people screwing up images by auto-levelling them and thinking they know about Photoshop is a far more common issue. I've seen perfectly exposed and balanced photos of tricky scenes, autobalanced and ruined by inexperienced users.

Fifer

Marty_J wrote: »

Even a correctly shot RAW needs processed, whereas a correctly shot JPEG does not.

That's a tad misleading. The only difference is that with the JPEG, the processing has already been done in the camera. As a minimum, both finished images will have received similar amounts of processing (the JPEG automatically under control of the camera).

Marty_J

isofa, I don't think we're really too far apart in our opinions. I would shoot RAW sometimes (making HDR images for instance), but most of the time it's JPEG.

Some pros shoot JPEG too, preferring to be out making money than editing their photos. Some shoot RAW if colour accuracy has to optimal or they have something in mind for the shoot that will require a lot of editing.

RAW files can look better, but so can JPEGs too. It just depends on the image and what has been done with it. I do think it's pretty undeniable that JPEGs have the edge as far as image size goes though. Yes, 1 TB HDDs are pretty cheap nowadays, but you'd need a 2 TB HDD to store the number of photos in RAW that you can store on a 1 TB HDD in JPEG. JPEGs can also be written to the camera's memory card faster, which means you can take more photos per second, and you can shoot continuously for longer before the buffer is full.

As I said previously, if you have to ask, you should probably just be shooting JPEG. Though of course, it doesn't do any harm to play around with RAW if you want to.