Who needs RAW?

[Isca]

It was an interesting set of circumstances that got me really thinking about this. I have been away for 2 weeks, had to get the OS on my notebook reinstalled and was stuck with a copy of PS7 so couldn't view the dng's in PS.

I did, however, have all the photos that I shot in the two week period in both jpg and dng format and had recently bought Jeff Anscough's set of actions so thougth that it would be good enough to tat least get some quick and dirty shots to look at.

As it turned out, they're all finished except for one that will have to be reworked so taht I can adjust the WB.

The whole experience was quite liberating and very time effective as I worked through about 40 shots in no time at all.

So now I'm left wondering whether I should continue to shoot dng and jpg but work off the jpg except for the relatively rare instance where I need ot adjust exposure or WB. The workflow is considerably faster and awhile many people may throw up their hands in horror, if i's good enough fo rJeff Anscough to work solely in jpg why not for the rest of us?

 

[Leighgion]

I think RAW gets an inflated reputation. While it unquestionably does maximize how much control you have over the process when shooting digital, I've come to feel it's that "final mile" thing. For photographers who are serious about wanting every bit of quality and control they can coax out of their gear, then RAW is a must of course, but the advantages shooting RAW in the practical world only go so far the majority of the time. Long as your camera's processing is doing its job reasonably, JPEG is more than good enough for most of us, including the needs of many pros.

Like many things though, i think it's silly to treat the issue as one you have to dedicate yourself one way or the other to. Your camera is configurable and you can change settings as many times and as often as you like. If JPEG is good enough for most of your work, by all means just shoot JPG, but some days you might want RAW or just feel like it, so you can do that too.

 

[MartinL]

I'm not a purist who is horrified by the loss of some data, nor do I disparage shooting jpeg with an M8. However, I find that a RAW/DNG workflow is not substantially slower---depending, of course, on your chosen workflow. A main consideration for me is that I like the pre-conversion tools in Bridge (CS3).

I shoot a lot of RAW, dump a lot when previewing, archive a lot, select relatively few for posting, and even fewer for prints. It's in the previewing stage that (IMO) it was the handiest to have ready jpeg files. In the early years of RAW it was very cumbersome to preview images without converting them, and slower computers were frustrating. With these time issues, I found conversion (and later, two-version shooting) was a necessary first step to editing.

Cheap storage/memory and faster processing makes RAW fast enough to dispense with jpeg.

 

[Photon42]

I tend to shoot everything in RAW. However, after an initial editing, I create JPGs from all but the "special" ones and remove the RAW files. Clearly, there is no free lunch, but at least this works for me.

 

[jlw]

Shooting JPEG is like doing crossword puzzles in ink. It's great if you never make mistakes, or don't mind making mistakes.

Personally, raw files have saved my bacon so many times that I'd rather not think about it. I archive all my raw files in DNG format with lossless compression, use a raw-image manager (Adobe Lightroom) to manage them, and never bother with JPEG files at all, except when I need them as an output format for web pages and such.

 

[Olsen]

Wether to drop RAW depends on camera too. And the technical development with time.

Whenever shooting with M8? Use DNG as a recording file. At least. I would also reccommend that you also store the file in RAW. This because the jpg file right out of the M8-camera, usually at 2,87 MB, is nothing but a 'scetch' of the real picture you have taken. - They are aweful! If you convert your DNG file, usually at 10,0 MB to a jpg via the Phase One - not from the camera, you get an excellent jpg file of up to 6,20 MB. - The jpg out of M8 is simply too lousy. And there won't be better ones since the computing power of the m8 is too poor to handle larger files. We have to wait until M9.

Compare this to, say, Canon's 1Ds II. The typical jpg file 'right out of the camera' is a high quality file of 6 - 7 MB. Sure, you can even improve it by going via a 16,6 MB RAW file and produce an even larger and better jpg file of 13 - 14 MB....

When I had my old 1Ds I did most of (99%) of my photos in excellent - best in the market place back then, jpg's, relatively speaking, of 2,50 MB. Today I deeply regret this. I should have kept RAW back-ups that I could have converted on better software and better personal technique to files of at least the double MBs. I have some excellent shots from my 1Ds of White Breasted Sea Eagles, while picking up fish from the sea, - in - today's terms - 'lausy' 2,00 MB jpgs. I could tear all my hair out. Keeping 'stamps' out of a camera that had the potential of making 'posters'. Unforgiving!

Keep for the future DNG/RAW files that can be handled by improved software to a constantly more demanding future. The larger, the better files.

My advice when shooting with M8: Shoot DNG's. - The M8 works best when it has a simple file to work with. Sort them and convert them in Phase 1. Keep the 'keepers' in both DNGs and jpgs - but those you convert out of Phase 1 at 6,20 + MB.

 

[Tuolumne]

Most of the time I can't see the difference between the jpg and the RAW. (This is with both my R-D1s and my Nikon D200.) The only times I have ever been able to tell the difference between the two is when the contrast and color of the jpg is better, sometimes dramatically so, and some times in a way I have never been able to mimic in any post-processing of the raw file. Of course if you save and re-process a jpg file repeatedly it does degrade each time you save it. But if you save the first jpg in tiff and keep it in tiff it will never degrade with repeated editings. I would like someone to show me a jpg and raw where the difference is discernable to the naked eye. Of course, I usually shoot in RAW/JPG. I'm a big believer in belt & suspenders. 🙂

/T

 

[cmogi10]

I could not even fathom relying on the M8's JPEG engine for my work, it is beyond unreliable.

 

[jlw]

I would like someone to show me a jpg and raw where the difference is discernable to the naked eye.

Click here for an article on the Pop Photo website that shows some easily discernable differences.

Of course, since it's from Pop Photo, feel free to dismiss it as just a big conspiracy scam between them and their advertisers to dupe photographers into buying bigger memory cards and hard disks to store their raw files, and believe whatever makes you feel good, regardless of the evidence. That's what people generally do anyway, and usually they seem to get along just fine.

 

[Dektol Dan]

Who needs RAW?

Not me.

A high quality JPEG is good enough. The advantage in digital is to save time. I can't speak for the M8, but for Canon JPEG is fine. They have an excellent track record of making algorithms to match the sensor.

I shoot far less digital these days as I dump more money into 'antique' lenses, and I love playing with color film after being locked into black and white because that's all I could afford to do in a dark room.

Scanning and the computer have changed my life, I save my scans in TIFFs. I can justify the time investment because it's still far less than if I were working in a wet lab.

Everything is always a 'compared to what', but I think it's foolish to shoot RAW just to save the one or two in a hundred shots that 'got away'. That's what photography is, if one is really good (and lucky) the big fish don't get away and they rarely squeak by.

 

[kuzano]

This is an interesting comment....

This is an interesting comment....

Most of the time I can't see the difference between the jpg and the RAW. I would like someone to show me a jpg and raw where the difference is discernable to the naked eye. /T

It was the intention of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) to write a compression algorythm that would compress a file and NOT BE DISCERNIBLE to the naked eye. They succeeded. But, if you run that algorythm several times on the same file, it WILL become discernible to the naked eye.

Understanding the method used to create a JPEG file may help to understand the risks taken by not retaining all the date as in a RAW capture.

JPEG compression looks at all the pixels in the file that are nearly identical (NOTICE Nearly). Depending on the aggressiveness of the compression, which is user defined, the pixels (let's say 50,000 nearly identical) are changed to one (1) pixel and mapped to all the locations the 50,000 were located. This is done with differing number of different "nearly" identical pixels. Thousands or tens of thousands of nearly identical pixels are then discarded to make the file byte size the same resolution but vastly smaller in terms of byte size. That data that is thrown away is never recoverable.

Now the aggresiveness is set by you the user on most camera. For instance Canon cameras (mostly consumer to keep it simple) have three quality settings, regular, fine and superfine. That means you set the compression to aggressive, medium and very little compression in those settings.

Furthermore, remember that when you save a JPEG in Photoshop, you are asked again the percent of compression you want to apply. Each time you answer that question, you run the compression routine on the file. After about ten saves and compressions... The NAKED eye will begin to see degradation.

So, we have a tool created by the Joint Photographic Expert Group that was originally designed during the dialup internet days, to send files over the internet, and to accomodate people with small storage capacities.

For the most part both of those limitations have decreased, but JPEG still abounds. And in doing so, it limits the image quality and the processing power of editors like photoshop.

It is good news that it works so well, and it may be all most of us need. However, the person who does everything possible for the last ounce of image quality should not use JPEG unless the images compressed by it are final out of the camera and good enough for the bulk of consumers who wouldn't know "quality" from Shinola.

 

[kuzano]

One tiny clarification.....

One tiny clarification.....

When I used the 50,000 "nearly" identical pixels, I meant pixels close enough to look the same to the naked eye. However they are different, but only bit information for one (1) of those 50,000 pixes is retained and mapped to 50,000 locations. So now, you actually have 50,000 identical pixels.

If you run the algorythm (save) twice and ask for another 10% reduction in file size, you broaden the definition of "nearly identical".

To prove this to yourself, and if you really want to know, open a file in Photoshop. Save the file and change the name and use a medium setting on the compression question. Do this 8 or 10 times, changing the file name each time to retain all the files. Use medium each time you save.

Now compare the beginning file and the ending file. Granted most of us would never do this many compressions in actual practice, but the point can be proven that data is discarded. Discarding data is the only way that file compression can possibly work.

 

[gavinlg]

Yep, I never shoot jpeg and never will unless in the extreme circumstance where I have to get a file to someone immediatly off the camera. The only JPEG engine I Trust is that in the fuji s5 pro - the only one that is more or less reliable and accurate.

When I did my photography/digital imaging course at university, they put a few images up on massive screens - jpegs out of camera and raws converted to TIFF files. They were generally pictures of landscapes - low light where the top of the sky was a dark blue and the near the horizon was lighter and brighter. Going in to 100% or even in some cases 75% on the RAW/TIFF/DNG files revealed beautiful smooth blue sky, and on the compressed JPEGs, revealed a posterized image. Posterized meaning there where definite layers of graduation between shades of blue. The teacher then went to tweak the levels/curves slightly to give the shot better contrast, and the difference was even more visible.

To the person that questioned wether shooting raw vs jpeg revealed a better file to the naked eye, yes it does. If you shoot a jpeg image and then a raw of the same file, convert it using lightroom and sharpen properly in photoshop, you can extract more detail out of the file.If you turn the sharpening up too far in-JPEG processing to compensate, you end up with serious artifacts that look like crap.

Not only that, but the m8 has a very poor JPEG engine. The ones in the nikon d40/canon xti are much better.

 

[Solinar]

High ISO image noise is better controlled by post processing RAW files with your computer as opposed to relying solely on the camera's imaging software. Color management and shadow recovery are also better.

Downsides to shooting RAW include the learning curve for post processing, software costs, write times to the memory card and the number of images that can be save to the card.

It is sort of like your choice of color film, back when many photographers glibly shot with the cheaper ISO 200 films from Kodak, which were usually on sale at half the price of professional films.

 

[usccharles]

here is a quick and dirty jpeg/raw comparison i did a while back

http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/leica-m8-forum/40749-dng-vs-jpeg-sharpness.html

i use jpegs for 80% of all my photo needs, but when it comes down to photos i need to enlarge and detail is critical. you need the RAW file. the in-camera jpeg converting does horrible things to sharpness of images.

😉

 

[kuzano]

Perhaps M8 not intended to shoot JPEG

Perhaps M8 not intended to shoot JPEG

Not only that, but the m8 has a very poor JPEG engine. The ones in the nikon d40/canon xti are much better.

If the remarks I have heard on this forum regarding the high quality DNG, and yet the poor performance on JPEG are any indication, it would seem that Leica chose an aggressive algorythm on compression and weighted the camera toward real performance on DNG. I do not find that surprising for a camera aimed at the high end of the market and priced accordingly.

 

[gavinlg]

I think it's more a case of just not tuning the jpeg engine very well. Some cameras are very good at it, some aren't. The fuji s5 pro is very good with JPEGs, and m8 isn't. It tends to get WB exposures very wrong, and the in camera sharpening, even at the normal level creates brutal artifacts

 

[Leighgion]

If the remarks I have heard on this forum regarding the high quality DNG, and yet the poor performance on JPEG are any indication, it would seem that Leica chose an aggressive algorythm on compression and weighted the camera toward real performance on DNG. I do not find that surprising for a camera aimed at the high end of the market and priced accordingly.

I am puzzled by this reasoning.

Considering the premium price of the M8 and Leica's reputation, I for one would consider it unforgivable for their flashship digital model to feature a poor JPEG processing engine. You don't "weight" a digital camera towards RAW performance vs JPG -- that's nonsense. There's no equation of tradeoff involved. Either a digital camera maker puts work into a good JPEG processing engine, or they don't.

If the M8's JPEG performance is as poor as people say, then Leica simply dropped that ball and... an M8 owner should definitely shoot RAW and I'm never going to become an M8 owner. If every other respectable digital camera maker can put a decent image processing engine into their cameras, Leica of all companies has no excuses.

 

[Sam R]

You guys are very smart, and I am very confused.. I have been using jpeg and Elements for software. I am about to purchase a new computer and will enter the world of RAW files. Can I get some direction on software I should be considering?

Thanks
Sam

 

[kuzano]

My comment did not mean intentional weighting

My comment did not mean intentional weighting

I meant that the result of their screwing up on the JPEG engine weighted the camera toward the RAW being better. In light of that, IF they did their testing and found the product weak on the pressure of getting to market (Which is the primary reason we get products in the technical market with glitches) may have forced the issue of correcting it or shipping it. I presume that if they knew how weak the JPEG was, they might have shipped on the basis of the strength of the rest of the feature set.

If they didn't know how poor the JPEG engine was, via testing, then they should not have produced a $4000 Plus camera, and they should have paid more attention to the partner that produced their consumer camera... Panasonic.

In either event, they made some bad decisions somewhere in the production of the M8