Can you beat the camera jpg-engine?

Let me put down my reasons more clearly for shooting jpg, not because I want others to do the same, but simply to see if I'm not deceiving myself.


I imagine myself, as a photographer during the film era and I'm shooting Kodachrome 64. When I go out, I know the limits of the film, and so on and I meter carefully and shoot. I send the film its developed and sent back to me. i go through the slides, throw away the one's that I don't like, mostly due to bad exposure and and keep the ones where I succeeded.

Now, why I should not follow this simple and elegant system with digital?

I go out my digital camera, shoot jpg and expose carefully. During editing I pick the ones where I succeeded and delete/archive the rest... Where as I used to go out, meter casually and then during editing decide on which files to process and each files took so much time and next thing, I was too afraid to even touch the backlog.

I'm shooting slide film, with a digital camera.
 
Hsg said:
. . . Now, why I should not follow this simple and elegant system with digital? . . .
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Because you don't have to.

Did you never make mistakes with slides? I did.

Did you ever bracket? I did.

Did you never want different colour balance with slides? I did.

Did you never want different contrast with slides? I did.

Raw (with enough megapixels) gives me 35mm slide quality with neg flexibility.

Surely, there is no reason to reject this. You don't have to edit raw. If you don't need to, why would you? But when you need the option...

Cheers,

R.
 
Roger Hicks said:
Because you don't have to.

Did you never make mistakes with slides? I did.

Did you never want different colour balance with slides? I did.

Did you never want different contrast with slides? I did.

Raw (with enough megapixels) gives me 35mm slide quality with neg flexibility.

Surely, there is no reason to reject this. You don't have to edit raw. If you don't need to, why would you? But when you need the option...

Cheers,

R.
Click to expand...

Those mistakes are acceptable to me, because digital is FREE and unlimited (flash memory and battery charge). I can shoot as much as I want so mistakes becomes acceptable.
 
Hsg said:
Those mistakes are acceptable to me, because digital is FREE and unlimited (flash memory and battery charge). I can shoot as much as I want so mistakes becomes acceptable.
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But why not correct them afterwards instead of re-shooting? Especially if you miss the decisive moment by piddling around re-setting the camera? I care more about taking the right picture at the right time than about what I see as bring a false purist trying to replicate slides with an M9 or Df. Besides, I used to have to bracket a lot more...

Cheers,

R.
 
I don't know what "beat the camera jpeg engine" means.

In camera JPEG engines are very highly tuned to give standard, normal, accurate color results. If that's what you want out of your photography, it's a good idea to take advantage of what they do well.

Most of my photography, on the other hand, is more abstractive and lives out of the 'standard, normal, accurate' milieu. I get a lot more out of working with raw files for those purposes; the in-camera processing does not address my needs very well. The raw workflow is more efficient and I have more control.

G
 
Roger Hicks said:
But why not correct them afterwards instead of re-shooting? Especially if you miss the decisive moment by piddling around re-setting the camera? I care more about taking the right picture at the right time than about what I see as bring a false purist trying to replicate slides with an M9 or Df. Besides, I used to have to bracket a lot more...

Cheers,

R.
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With live histogram in almost every decent digital camera, and with WB presets and even the auto WB or custom WB, there is absolutely no excuse to get the exposure or WB wrong with today's digital cameras.


But as I said this is not propaganda, because then people will say Fuji or Olympus or canon for jpgs. That is not correct because a jpg-engine just like film is not liked by everyone, so the first thing to do is to buy the camera with your favorite jpg engine.
 
Obviously this is more about personal workflow rather than file format. RAW gives a little extra data to work with or to mess up. Of course, you could also take a decent (read: neutral) JPG and start from there in PS. No big deal.
 
Hsg said:
Let me put down my reasons more clearly for shooting jpg, not because I want others to do the same, but simply to see if I'm not deceiving myself.


I imagine myself, as a photographer during the film era and I'm shooting Kodachrome 64. When I go out, I know the limits of the film, and so on and I meter carefully and shoot. I send the film its developed and sent back to me. i go through the slides, throw away the one's that I don't like, mostly due to bad exposure and and keep the ones where I succeeded.

Now, why I should not follow this simple and elegant system with digital?

I go out my digital camera, shoot jpg and expose carefully. During editing I pick the ones where I succeeded and delete/archive the rest... Where as I used to go out, meter casually and then during editing decide on which files to process and each files took so much time and next thing, I was too afraid to even touch the backlog.

I'm shooting slide film, with a digital camera.
Click to expand...

So you are satisfied with limits and others are not.
Sounds right?

I feel like you are quizzing for the correct answer.
Keith had it many posts ago. Jpegs are like a develop and print service.
If it's good enough for the occasion it is. If it's not there us potential for more via RAW capture and Post workflow.
Correct?
 
Makes sense to me. I love the idea of the Fuji film simulation profiles.
A major reason I chose my digital camera is the quality of its JPEGs.

Though I can enjoy hours spent making a few wet prints in the darkroom
I find digital postprocessing quite tedious and not particularly rewarding.

Chris
 
One of the assumptions being made here, I think, by the OP is that use of recent and more modern JPEG engines means processing from RAW is not needed as much as it used to be. In my case, though, two of my most-used cameras are quite old by digital standards (an original Canon 5D and a Canon 50D). The JPEG engines in those haven't got any better, but RAW processing engines have (as, I'd like to think, have my post-processing skills).

One thing that shooting RAW does allow you is the ability to re-visit old shots (say, from my Canon 300D) and process them again with improved software and skills. I've occasionally done this and it has made an appreciable difference.

I generally shoot RAW+JPEG and have often been glad that I do: whether for the convenience of a ready-to-use JPEG, the opportunity to fine tune a RAW image if printing at larger sizes or re-visiting an old photo to use it for a new purpose.

...Mike
 
I think the question comes down to, limits.

I have decided that I need the limit of jpg in order to regain some energy to actually photograph, rather than push slides and worry about a backlog.

if I had the skill to actually cook the RAW files better than the jpgs I get from the camera itself, I'd have stuck to shooting RAW, but I simply lack the processing skills.

The only time I want to spend energy on photography is when I'm taking photos, not when I'm at home, so I'll try to get it right on location. I think this is the right decision for me - to shoot jpgs.
 
Hsg said:
I think the question comes down to, limits.

I have decided that I need the limit of jpg in order to regain some energy to actually photograph, rather than push slides and worry about a backlog.

if I had the skill to actually cook the RAW files better than the jpgs I get from the camera itself, I'd have stuck to shooting RAW, but I simply lack the processing skills.

The only time I want to spend energy on photography is when I'm taking photos, not when I'm at home, so I'll try to get it right on location. I think this is the right decision for me - to shoot jpgs.
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Sounds very reasonable. I don't like doing tons of post either. Doing batches though is fairly painless.

For me it's the camera I'm using.
With the Xpro1 or my old M8 I shot RAW guided by histogram. Limiting my "chimping" while in the field and rather spending the "chimping" time on the computer. It works great and I now get what I need from files and make adjustments in batches of images painlessly. (I learned a lot from this crew here since joining in 2009 as well, processors are now much more instant and intuitive).

With the Ricoh GR I compose and take on a nice 3" screen on the back. The Jpeg pre-view on that screen is often a reasonable enough representation.
Plus that camera for me is mostly delegated to journaling and snapshots.
I've yet to use an image from it for a work project or for a photo client.
Although I recently used it for a tutorial on harvesting Comfrey to make a fertilizer tea.
I have no RAWs from that set... relying completely on the Jpegs. I doubt the garden blog will suffer!
What a great compact companion!

Cheers!
 
Hsg said:
With live histogram in almost every decent digital camera, and with WB presets and even the auto WB or custom WB, there is absolutely no excuse to get the exposure or WB wrong with today's digital cameras. . . .
Click to expand...

Unless you're in a hurry. Which some of us are, sometimes. Light changes; unexpected situations arise. Do not assume that everyone has all the time in the world, even if that's the way you take your pictures.

"Absolutely no excuse"? Pull the other one!

Cheers,

R.
 
Depends on the camera. When I shoot with my D700, the RAW and the JPEG look pretty close, and I can work with either (usually). My Aperture won't handle RAW files from my Leica-branded D-lux 6 (Panasonic), so I take JPEGS, and they are darn near always great. Same for the X10. This brings us to the Leica M8.2. I shoot RAW only, because I can easily do a better job of processing the RAW file than the camera's JPEG. In fact, a baloney sandwich could do a better job than an M8 JPEG. They are bad. And I'm only an amateur.
 
I personally cannot beat the RAW-JPG conversion engines in the Fuji X-cameras, because of their excellent menu options. (This was a deciding factor in me switching to Fuji gear.)
However, I can (almost) always tweak the output JPG a bit to make it more to my liking with usually minor (but sometimes, major) computer work.

So, yes, some cameras can do very excellent RAW-JPG conversions.
 
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