Considering lightening my post processing load with the new X100s

Ken Ford

Ken Ford

Refuses to suffer fools
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I've found my personal photographic choke point is postprocessing - shooting everything in RAW+JPG and running it through PS after has turned into drudgery. I was never a big darkroom person, either.

Now that I have the new X100s on the way I'm giving serious thought to shooting JPG only and doing all my processing on my iPad using simpler post applications. I've dabbled a little with this using my NEX7.

Has anyone else gone this route?
 
Around 95 % of my keepers from my X100 are directly OOC JPEGs, often slightly cropped to a perfect frame. That's all I usually invest in PP.
Because of the remaining 5 % I configured JPEG+RAW to have it handy, if required.
It works since years perfectly.
 
I was in the same boat - love shooting, hate slogging through the raw files. When I bought the OMD I started shooting jpeg+raw, and found that the OOC jpegs were quite satisfactory. I occasionally go back to the raw files if I botched the exposure or something, but shooting 90% jpegs has been liberating
 
I've been reading more on this and think I'm going to do it - the fact that I can do wireless transfers from the X100s to my iPad using an Eye-Fi card was the clincher.
 
Once the lossless JPEG format is released/updated/implemented, I will do the same. JPEG is just such a rotten format, though--the worst. Why don't we have PNG instead?
 
I use raw to get the most out of my cameras sensor.. But these days depending on how good the jpg output is from your camera, it is not a bad idea if u are shooting jpg+raw, so that at least u have the raw to fall back on..

The biggest single issue is Jpg is not lossless and every edit and save back to Jpg creates more loss. U can mitigate the potential damage by using photo editing sw that never changes the original, but instead adds delta editing info to create the final outcome for print or final consumption (like Apple's Aperture) or immediately convert the first edit to tiff16 instead of saving it back as jpg.

I use raw as my default and I have setup several "canned" photo effects (I created like a script) that tend to be my common approaches to editing photos. Aperture is good at helping me select only the one I really want to work on before I start the process of final edits as well.

Gary
 
I've been experimenting with Xtrans OOC Jpegs lately as well.
So far it's a no go.

Can I suggest you dump PS and get a simpler editor inline?
Aperture for Mac users or LR5 for everyone is much more library friendly than PS/Bridge.
It's a breeze to quickly flip through images to search for keepers, test quick edits, and cull the detritus using Aperture.
The quick keys and loupe make culling a simple task. This simplifies editing RAW files into a much more productive task.

IDK maybe the iPad has a decent editor app available. Last I looked there was not.

Cheers!
 
I shoot the X100 jpeg only. Every year or so I press the raw button and have a raw file to process just in case. Can't remember that I ever actually needed one of those.
 
Ken Ford said:
Meaning?

I currently spend less than ten minutes per keeper in processing, but finding the uninterrupted time to sit in front of the PC is the issue. And I'm brutal in my editing.
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I admire your talent and skill. If post-processing is a burden at 10 mins. per keeper, and you are a ruthless editor, you are an extraordinary photographer.
 
willie_901 said:
I admire your talent and skill. If post-processing is a burden at 10 mins. per keeper, and you are a ruthless editor, you are an extraordinary photographer.
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If I come back from a weekend of shooting with six keepers worthy of processing (typical), that's an hour trapped in front of the computer right there - plus the related overhead of backups and the sort.

Why the pointed comments? Have I pissed you off in some way, or are you just trying to get a rise out of me? Has RFF become the new pnet Leica forum?
 
Doesn't make sense to me to buy an expensive camera, fuss about the lens and particulars, go through all that decision making and photographer's voodoo... only to shoot jpgs.
 
Frank Petronio said:
Doesn't make sense to me to buy an expensive camera, fuss about the lens and particulars, go through all that decision making and photographer's voodoo... only to shoot jpgs.
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I don't see the disconnect. No different than shooting chromes for projection...
 
Ken Ford said:
It's coming across as passive-aggressive sarcasm.
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Context is hard on the internet. I wondered which of the two it was when I read it. But perhaps it might be good to reflect on what willie_901 meant: your skill is such that your photos require little "tweaking." Whether you wish to speed things up any, you are confident with your OOC shots in most (keeper) cases. You aren't applying fancy fixes. So please accept the nice thing he said.

If you will be archiving these shots and reviewing them on a larger screen anyway, is having a fixed custom process you can apply in Lightroom (or similar) an option? It shouldn't add more than seconds to a review-and-save-or-delete process.

I might also be worth considering how much time would be saved by doing the "simple" work you mention on the JPGs. Will doing it on a slower device eat into the saved time?

I'm a terrible sufferer of GAS, and if it were me that would be the cause of thoughts of a new camera. YMMV
 
there are no shortcuts.

if you are willing to compromise on final output quality, that is a perfectly acceptable way to go about things. autofocus and autoexposure are compromises too, in their own ways.

again, it's fine to make those compromises. just as long as you're honest about what you're doing.
 
In stopped shooting in RAW long time ago, even don't remember when. Nothing lost from this decision. Well, maybe I'm missing something, yes, but couldn't understand what exactly. Too lazy.

I love to edit photos on my phone. Touching the screen for me much nicer than a permanent job with pc mouse (this reminds me work in darkroom). Unfortunately, power of modern tablets isn't high enough to produce serious manipulations with photos with good quality in image on output. I'm still dreaming about that and hope my dreams come true in near future.
 
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