Shooting RAW a waste of time?

upceci said:
I have no doubt RAW files will give better results with processing when it comes to IQ only, but processing also means a lot of time spent in pressing buttons and playing with sliders, the stuff that does not interest me because I'm interested in the photos not sitting there and "playing" with photos.

I have begun to actually see shooting RAW as making one's work more than it should be and a waste of time, not to mention making one susceptible to be a photoshoper than a photographer.

My new must-have criterion for buying a new camera, great jpgs.
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Lol if you shoot JPEG, your camera is the one doing the photoshopping for you. Try shooting RAW and see if the unprocessed file looks good to you.
 
Aristophanes said:
It will be interesting to see how much software is built right into the camera for PP and/or is made immediately available to a nearby tablet. This is n't about sharing or cloud computing but about the blunt reality that the vast majority of even the higher-end market (Asia, even Japan, and other emerging economies) are skipping entirely the concept of the home PC and therefore the entire concept of the digital darkroom on one.
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A digital darkroom isn't exactly tied down to a home PC. As long as a machine computes, it can be a digital darkroom. Tablets and smartphones are good examples.
 
When it comes to the Foveon cameras from Sigma, I find that at times it would be impossible to shoot anything but raw. These cases involve setting the lowest acceptable shutter speed, iso, and aperture for an exposure I know I cannot have enough light for. So I underexpose a shot because I have no choice and I pull the image out, later. Usually I'll get a decent image from impossible light. I am curious, though, do still cameras behave like cinema cameras, wherein they are rated for a native ISO, and any ISP adjustment means nothing as adjustment can be taken care of during raw processing?

To be fair, I shot a few test jpegs on my DP3, and they look pretty decent.

Now, I suppose this is nothing compared to pushing a roll of film a couple stops, but it's the closest thing I can do with a slow digital camera.
 
igi said:
Lol if you shoot JPEG, your camera is the one doing the photoshopping for you. Try shooting RAW and see if the unprocessed file looks good to you.
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An uprocessed raw file never looks good because you can't see it. If you can see it on the screen it's already processed and a raw converter already applied some presets.
 
upceci said:
Image quality is a marketing gimmick and also a convenient aspect of photography that anyone irrespective of their skill level can grab onto.

The postcard-conditioning of people since childhood is hard to shed, after all postcards are the perfect examples of 'perfect photographs', technically.

Without image quality factor why should people pay for large sensors, expensive lenses and what not? After all most photographers are out there to produce postcards, even if they're not aware of it... But then the whole history of great photography is photographs that are not like postcards.

In the end this argument becomes a question of photography aesthetics. Postcard aesthetic with obsessive image quality consideration or allowing the photographs to develop their own aesthetic, the hallmark of all great photographs, a certain look that becomes a signature. While most of us cannot reach those levels, at least its better to try rather than go for the postcard perfection, which in the end of the day looks like any other postcard...

A jpg is also postcard-like but then by allowing for 'mistakes', its possible to get a more unpostcard-like look.

I'm not even mildly interested in postcards.
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I do not see clearly the link between the jpeg destructive compression format and "I do not know how to use RAW or why I should" and "what is art".

Seriously, taking pictures is not rocket science :
- you like paper and chemicals, go in a darkroom
- you like digital, go shoot RAW and use a calibrated monitor if possible

If you do not like the craft and do not want to learn it, use a cellphone/instagram or much better a polaroid. The camera and the Nikanotax engineers have done 90% the work. But you will be limited by what they have already made.

I do not see the point in registering here of all places and saying "Image quality is a marketing gimmick", "I don't have the time to look at my own pictures". What do you want here ? Guidance, technical answers, reassurance? Why all the angst?

Also, try speaking to musicians and sound engineers saying "you are manipulated, sound quality is a gimmick, mp3 is fine": it is, yes, if you do not care. I do not, but I'm not trained to spot the difference either and I do not go around saying nobody can.
 
S.H. said:
I do not see clearly the link between the jpeg destructive compression format and "I do not know how to use RAW or why I should" and "what is art".

Seriously, taking pictures is not rocket science :
- you like paper and chemicals, go in a darkroom
- you like digital, go shoot RAW and use a calibrated monitor if possible

If you do not like the craft and do not want to learn it, use a cellphone/instagram or much better a polaroid. The camera and the Nikanotax engineers have done 90% the work. But you will be limited by what they have already made.

I do not see the point in registering here of all places and saying "Image quality is a marketing gimmick", "I don't have the time to look at my own pictures". What do you want here ? Guidance, technical answers, reassurance? Why all the angst?

Also, try speaking to musicians and sound engineers saying "you are manipulated, sound quality is a gimmick, mp3 is fine": it is, yes, if you do not care. I do not, but I'm not trained to spot the difference either and I do not go around saying nobody can.
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Hard to disagree.

Cheers,

R.
 
If your camera can shoot RAW and JPEG simultaneously, take the RAW file, apply appropriate post-processing / sharpening to get it to your taste and then compare with the JPEG straight out of the camera.

Okay, "appropriate" is a subjective concept - but let's assume you know how to apply layers and ajust levels, curves, hue/saturation, adjust exposure and then apply sharpening without over-doing it and introducing the gritty artefacts that some JPEGS produce.

There's a reason that professional photographers who work in advertising, product, travel and portraiture / fashion, etc tend to use RAW - and that is because it allows greater levels of customisation whilst optimising end quality.

JPEGS are fine for most things but, if you want to wring the best out of the kit you have, processing RAW files is worth the effort, IMO.
 
The argument that ends this thread for me is a simple one, I no longer care for image quality.

If the images I produce appeal to me then that is the ultimate satisfaction I can get from photography in this day when no one really cares for other people's photos - I mean I'd be honest, I don't.
 
upceci said:
The argument that ends this thread for me is a simple one, I no longer care for image quality.

If the images I produce appeal to me then that is the ultimate satisfaction I can get from photography in this day when no one really cares for other people's photos - I mean I'd be honest, I don't.
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The great thing about RAW files is that you can make them look worse than JPEGS! Amazing, really.
 
benlees said:
The great thing about RAW files is that you can make them look worse than JPEGS! Amazing, really.
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The whole effort for me is a waste of time. And when I say I don't care about image quality it does not mean I will make photos worse, I'm saying that let the camera be my photoshop, I'll try to be the photographer.
 
Aristophanes said:
It's already happening. Direct from camera, very minimal editing now for the majority of photojournalism. Editing is a cost centre and web-ready images are by far what is dominant due to immediacy. I'm not talking smartphones or P&S, I'm talking paparazzi to emergency radio band journalists using top Canons and Nikons.
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So, where seconds and minutes are critical, and the actual technical quality of the photo is secondary to its documentary communication, folks are publishing straight from cameras. OK. That says nothing to me that those same pros don't want desktop machines to manage their photo libraries.
 
If you're an "Ansel Adams" shooter where your aim is to take a breathtaking "perfect" shot of that mountaintop, and you're waiting for hours/days for the lighting to be jusssst right with your perfectly-positioned Linhof, and your aim is to dodge and burn and spend days, weeks, months in the darkroom until you reach perfection for that ONE perfect print that will be on display in a gallery. And by no stretch are you willing to delegate your post work to some firmware and an algorithm -- then RAW.

If you're trying to subsist as a microstock phtographer shooting and uploading 100's of pictures and hoping that 1 in 10 will sell for $0.25 and you're uploading 1000's of photos a week. JPEG.

Me? I'm in-between. I shoot JPEG. I think that the processing and tech in modern digital cameras do a fine job. However, I convert all JPEGS to PSD, Photoshop's native format using "scripts" function. I delete the original JPEGs. This gives me a "digital negative" but I hate that term. Really what I'm after is a lossless file format with reasonable compressing/file sizes where I can preserve and manipulate layers but not some giant azz raw file that bogs down my laptop with all kinds of extraneous bits and bytes I don't need. I'll let the in-camera firmware do the heavy/tedious lifting. I then have an assortment of actions, presets in the channel mixer, and some favorite tools I like to use in the Nik Collection -- usually a film emulation for color or a black and white one in Silver Effects but I do make use of all the software. I then make various JPEG copies from that one original PSD file with various levels of quickly applied tweeks without introducing recompression artifacts while preserving the original lossless PSD. It's also a fast, streamlined workflow.

I'll sometimes shoot RAW+jpeg in real crappy lighting but that's about it. I think RAW zealots are silly, personally.
 
upceci said:
I have no doubt RAW files will give better results with processing when it comes to IQ only, but processing also means a lot of time spent in pressing buttons and playing with sliders, the stuff that does not interest me because I'm interested in the photos not sitting there and "playing" with photos.

I have begun to actually see shooting RAW as making one's work more than it should be and a waste of time, not to mention making one susceptible to be a photoshoper than a photographer.

My new must-have criterion for buying a new camera, great jpgs.
Click to expand...

PP is just part of the process as it was with film and a darkroom. I want the control to get the finished image to be what I saw in my minds eye at exposure and to consistently get that I need all the control that raw gives me.
 
upceci said:
I have no doubt RAW files will give better results with processing when it comes to IQ only, but processing also means a lot of time spent in pressing buttons and playing with sliders, the stuff that does not interest me because I'm interested in the photos not sitting there and "playing" with photos.

I have begun to actually see shooting RAW as making one's work more than it should be and a waste of time, not to mention making one susceptible to be a photoshoper than a photographer.

My new must-have criterion for buying a new camera, great jpgs.
Click to expand...

To you perhaps, certainly not to all. No need to over generalize 😎
 
Nice, a thread from 2013! But I'm cool with it cuz I never saw it back then. I think I was still in high school...

If you are happy not having control over your images but lets the corporation that sold you the camera make the call, sure, shoot jpegs.
🙂
 
NickTrop said:
If you're an "Ansel Adams" shooter where your aim is to take a breathtaking "perfect" shot of that mountaintop, and you're waiting for hours/days for the lighting to be jusssst right with your perfectly-positioned Linhof, and your aim is to dodge and burn and spend days, weeks, months in the darkroom until you reach perfection for that ONE perfect print that will be on display in a gallery. And by no stretch are you willing to delegate your post work to some firmware and an algorithm -- then RAW.

If you're trying to subsist as a microstock phtographer shooting and uploading 100's of pictures and hoping that 1 in 10 will sell for $0.25 and you're uploading 1000's of photos a week. JPEG.

Me? I'm in-between. I shoot JPEG. I think that the processing and tech in modern digital cameras do a fine job. However, I convert all JPEGS to PSD, Photoshop's native format using "scripts" function. I delete the original JPEGs. This gives me a "digital negative" but I hate that term. Really what I'm after is a lossless file format with reasonable compressing/file sizes where I can preserve and manipulate layers but not some giant azz raw file that bogs down my laptop with all kinds of extraneous bits and bytes I don't need. I'll let the in-camera firmware do the heavy/tedious lifting. I then have an assortment of actions, presets in the channel mixer, and some favorite tools I like to use in the Nik Collection -- usually a film emulation for color or a black and white one in Silver Effects but I do make use of all the software. I then make various JPEG copies from that one original PSD file with various levels of quickly applied tweeks without introducing recompression artifacts while preserving the original lossless PSD. It's also a fast, streamlined workflow.

I'll sometimes shoot RAW+jpeg in real crappy lighting but that's about it. I think RAW zealots are silly, personally.
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Never thought of doing it that way Nick.
Thanks for that , I`ll give it some thought.
 
Back in the day, if you shot film, and processed it yourself, printed it yourself in the darkroom, using different grade papers to control contrast, etc.; then shooting RAW is an extension of that.

Back in the day, if you shot Kodak Gold film you bought at the Drug Store, and had it processed/printed at the Fotomat stand alone kiosk in the parking lot; then shooting JPEG is an extension of that.

Best,
-Tim
 
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