A Repulsive Suggestion

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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I’m going to suggest something to serious and accomplished digital shooters that they will find repulsive. Shoot jpegs. What? Give up the ability that raw files give us to not only correct errors, but to apply our own brilliant creative interpretation to the images? Not exactly. I’m suggesting you save a small jpeg along with your raw file. Why? Because that relatively unalterable jpeg is a great lesson in exposure metering. For example, I saw that I was way underexposing in order to guarantee that I would not blow out the highlights in my raw files. I still expose in a way to protect highlight detail, but, in not overdoing it, I’ve got a file that holds more shadow detail in contrasty scenes. Hardly life changing, but any small, incremental change is welcome. In a sense, a better jpg means a better raw file. Besides, I’ve got a small set of jpegs I can attach to emails to friends.

As always, your thoughts… Anything else jpegs can tell us?
 
Serious and accomplished shooters don't need a lesson in exposure metering. Shooting JPEG is like pulling the plug on half your car's fuel injectors to save gas.
 
I now shoot only JPEGs. I see no difference in quality to Raw images when I look at the sizes I print photos and the uses I make of my photos. But I still use Lightroom. I won't give up the control. I still shoot JPEGs like Raw, knowing how I want to bake them with software in the end. There's a helluva lot more information in a JPEG than we're led to believe--if you start with a good exposure and a proper file.

When I started shooting digital back in the mid-2000s, "experts" on photo forums convinced me that JPEGs were only for snapshooters taking pictures of their cats, flowers, sunsets and babies. So I shot Raw and never even considered JPEGs until a few months ago. After switching, I discovered what I already knew--most of the "expert advice" provided on the Internet is a bunch of bullfeathers.

Not to brag but what JPEGs told me was that I must have learned a little bit about exposure and what I want in my photos in all those years I have been taking my "snapshots".
 
shoot NEF in one slot and jpegs in the other. more for redundancy really. like Bill, I more or less expose to save the highlights, so my files will look one stop under, usually. if I am on a super tight deadline, the jpeg will get filed, if I have the luxury of time, I'll work the raw file. I think Reuters has mandated that all photographers, freelance and staff, only shoot jpg. I think this still stands, but open to be corrected with current data.
 
Dogman said:
I now shoot only JPEGs. I see no difference in quality to Raw images when I look at the sizes I print photos and the uses I make of my photos. But I still use Lightroom. I won't give up the control. I still shoot JPEGs like Raw, knowing how I want to bake them with software in the end. There's a helluva lot more information in a JPEG than we're led to believe--if you start with a good exposure and a proper file.

When I started shooting digital back in the mid-2000s, "experts" on photo forums convinced me that JPEGs were only for snapshooters taking pictures of their cats, flowers, sunsets and babies. So I shot Raw and never even considered JPEGs until a few months ago. After switching, I discovered what I already knew--most of the "expert advice" provided on the Internet is a bunch of bullfeathers.

Not to brag but what JPEGs told me was that I must have learned a little bit about exposure and what I want in my photos in all those years I have been taking my "snapshots".
Click to expand...

The quality difference between JPEG and RAW is so extreme that I don't see how you could not see it unless you never print anything but 4x6. When I process RAW files I get about twice the real fine detail resolution of an in-camera JPEG, in addition to better color rendering and tonality. I won't even do snapshots of my cat with JPEGs.

When I was in art school, the photography professor had a huge sign posted in the university's darkroom. It said: "If you're not going to do it right, don't bother to start. You're wasting your time and getting in the way of your classmates who want to accomplish something in life." In everything I do, I have lived by that philosophy and it has paid off.

That may seem extremely uncompromising, but I have known since I was young that with all of the health problems I have that I am not going to live a long life; I don't have time to waste and don't want my life to have been a waste. Cutting corners to save time is a waste, and for me there can be no compromise.
 
I've always shot this way, RAW plus a small jpeg, mainly for the ease of handing off jpeg proofs to an art director after a shoot. It is much faster than spinning off jpegs from RAW in Capture One, Lightroom or ACR.

It's not common, but occasionally a jpeg will surprise me with a rendering that I did not visualize and that leads me to post-process the file differently. Adding a small jpeg is painless and well worth the disk space.

You don't know what you don't know, until you see it.
 
Sneaky is a cat, and therefore above such trivial discussions...
Chris is of course correct about the additional detail and greater manipulability of RAW. But (and this is a big "BUT"), not everyone wants or needs that degree of control. Likewise, the extreme high resolution that current sensors are capable of is often a turn-off to those of us who've shot film all our lives. Often, to me, it just looks "wrong". My feeling is that someone with a good knowledge of exposure, and an awareness of their particular camera's behavior in JPEG, can pretty much nail what they want if they remain cognizant of the limitations of post-processing in JPEG, if that meets their needs.
My argument is that quality depends upon purpose. For Chris' purposes, he needs RAW. Others are fine with JPEG.
Like Chris, I suffered through art school as well, at roughly the same time. I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the Zone System, large format, f/64 style of photography.
Sharpness and long tonal scale were the twin criteria for quality. Those have their place, and I can appreciate that style. But these days, I'm more moved by the work Robert Frank did in "The Americans". It's a parallel issue, within the film paradigm, but relevant. And I shoot monochrome JPEG. Gasp!!!
 
I remember back in the day of the Fuji s3,4,5 I knew a number of wedding photographers that made great money and they shot jpeg/raw and 99% of the time just used the jpeg's. The jpeg's were fine and they needed to turn the images quick and dirty so to say. So it was nail the exposure and go with it. I do the same thing today I shoot raw/jpeg and 90% of the time I print the jpeg. We are all different, and do what works for you. Remember in photography we have to first learn the rules and then learn to break them.
Enjoy.
 
Using a JPEG to help one better meter a scene is a great idea.

One thing to consider is that when you preview a shot on the back screen the camera is creating a JPEG for that preview regardless of the output settings. And the histogram is also based on that JPEG conversion. I read this somewhere long ago, and it makes sense based on experiences I've had with my Nikon D700s and D800E.

I've noticed that when the camera's histogram and previews show blown out highlights I often do not have blown out highlights when viewing the RAW file after downloading it onto my computer.
 
Bill Pierce said:
I’m going to suggest something to serious and accomplished digital shooters that they will find repulsive. Shoot jpegs. What? Give up the ability that raw files give us to not only correct errors, but to apply our own brilliant creative interpretation to the images? Not exactly. I’m suggesting you save a small jpeg along with your raw file. Why? Because that relatively unalterable jpeg is a great lesson in exposure metering. For example, I saw that I was way underexposing in order to guarantee that I would not blow out the highlights in my raw files. I still expose in a way to protect highlight detail, but, in not overdoing it, I’ve got a file that holds more shadow detail in contrasty scenes. Hardly life changing, but any small, incremental change is welcome. In a sense, a better jpg means a better raw file. Besides, I’ve got a small set of jpegs I can attach to emails to friends.

As always, your thoughts… Anything else jpegs can tell us?
Click to expand...

I don’t shoot small JPEGs. I shoot full-size JPEGs in addition to RAW files, and most of the larger prints I’ve made (16”x20” for me) and images I’ve had published in magazines and newspapers over the past several years came from the OOC JPEGs since they captured what I wanted. If the light and exposure are good and the in-camera processing delivers the look I want, I don’t see need to process the RAW files. Most of a photo is what’s in a frame, not the post-processing employed and to suggest otherwise reeks of snobbery, IMO.
 
Bill Pierce said:
I want to hear what Sneaky thinks about this. After all, he owes his international fame in the photo community to online jpegs.
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There's nothing wrong with saving a JPEG version of an image shot in RAW after its been edited. There are some purposes, like posting online and sending to some photo labs, that require a JPEG. What I am telling people not to do is shooting in-camera JPEGs.

I've never seen a JPEG created in-camera that had the resolution a properly processed image from a RAW file has. The cameras use too much noise reduction and compensate by using too much sharpening. Most cameras let you set how much sharpening and noise reduction you want the camera to use, but I have never been able to get the image quality from in-camera JPEGs no matter what settings I used.
 
I rarely bother using RAW. My photography experience began way back in film era. To me, getting a JPEG right is like getting film exposed correctly. I understand that using RAW gives greater latitude in processing, but I prefer trying to get the look I want straight out of the camera. And I find that when using Lightroom, there's enough wiggle room in JPEG files to correct any minor mistakes I made at exposure.

One other thought: When using RAW files processed in software outside your camera means you abandon whatever color science expertise the camera designers have, and turn it over to the software designers' taste/expertise.
 
This is one of the most reccurring themes on the photo forums, debate that cannot be settled.
I guess that slow shooters like landscape photographers would see no benefits shooting in jpg at all having histogram , spot metering options etc but for sport , magazine photogs , papparazis given the volume of the photos taken jpgs would be obvious choice. Then there is just a bunch of people who see no difference between shooting jpg and raw or even consider jpgs being superior than raw ( ie some Fuji camera owners). And perhaps AI software will soon allow for automatic bulk process of Raw files to convince some of the Raw only types and the rest will simply want to have full control of every bit of data regardless.
 
Bill Pierce said:
I’m suggesting you save a small jpeg along with your raw file. Why? Because that relatively unalterable jpeg is a great lesson in exposure metering.
Click to expand...

Not if the objective is to learn how to record optimal RAW files. Optimal jpg exposure is usually different from optimal raw exposure. And the nature and extent of the differences between raw and jpg files varies across camera models, across jpg settings within a given model, and across different scene conditions, so there is no simple rule-of-thumb for translating observations from one to the other.
 
My M8 is set up to do both. Given that camera’s odd color rendering, that’s only prudent. My Canons, however, are jpeg-only. They’re used only for newspaper work and jpegs are just fine. If I want to make prints, I shoot film.
 
Oren Grad said:
Not if the objective is to learn how to record optimal RAW files. Optimal jpg exposure is usually different from optimal raw exposure. And the nature and extent of the differences between raw and jpg files varies across camera models, across jpg settings within a given model, and across different scene conditions, so there is no simple rule-of-thumb for translating observations from one to the other.
Click to expand...

Oren - You are one of the people well qualified to speak on this subject. If you want to expand on your thoughts, it would be much appreciated.
 
I'm a SOOC shooter for the most part.
Early on in my digital life I was told to save RAW as well as JPEG files whenever possible, even though I didn't have a clue as to what a RAW file actually was.
I've found my jpeg's to be acceptable for my purposes as I rarely print.
After reading this thread, I might be so bold as to suggest Mr Crawford needs to look at changing his camera brand to get a better quality jpeg.
I might add that what I like to do to help learn how to expose better, is put the image in my rudimentary photo editor and hit the 'auto' adjustment button to see how 'they' would modify the image to make it 'better'.
 
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