Who's the boss?

[Bill Pierce]

The two photographers that helped me out when I started, Gene Smith and David Vestal, were very different in the images they produced, but identical in their insistence that your photography was not only a product of the moment of you took the picture, but also how you chose to print the picture. The darkroom, and considerable time spent in it, was an important part of their photography. David lived long enough that his work extended into the digital darkroom and was of equal importance to him as the chemical darkroom.

But, with digital, you don’t have to have a digital darkroom. You can shoot a jpg and show it on your computer screen, email it to a friend or put it on the web for the world to see with little or no change to what you saw on the screen of your digital camera. (Indeed, some news organizations want out-of-the-camera jpegs because they are more “honest.” Boy, do they have a limited idea of what is the truth and how people bend it.)

And, to again be honest, that jpg is pretty much the digital equivalent of the film world’s drugstore print that filled family albums and made a lot of people happy. And yet, unmanipulated jpgs straight out of the camera don’t make me happy. And the digital equivalent of a darkroom makes the wet darkroom’s exposure and contrast selection, burning, dodging and bleaching quite easy. Why bother with all those adjustments?

Because I want the picture to reflect what I saw. With my eyes and brain I can concentrate on that part of what is in front of me that interests me.. When I print or make a screen image I can increase the the contrast or brightness of what is important and suppress it in what I consider unimportant. (And with Lightroom’s new “select subject” tool this can be very easy and quick.) I can even crop out what I think is unimportant. I can make a print bright and cheery or dark and dramatic, with a full range of tones or a limited one. All in all, I can make the picture mine. Sometime the camera and I agree on what we saw. More often, not so much. Is it egomaniacal to think my adjusted and personalized raw files are “better” than my camera’s jpgs? It’s a good camera, but I paid for its computer, and I pay to keep it in freshly charged batteries. It works for me, not me for it. We’re going raw.

Your thoughts?

 

[Timmyjoe]

Happened to watch a documentary on Richard Avedon the other night. It was made while he was still alive so he is interviewed in a number of segments. I found it interesting how he described himself as a photographer as one who makes images, creates images; how he manipulates what was captured by the camera to be his vision, what he wants the image to look like, almost like a painter.

I spent a lot of years doing documentary and news photography, and I had the guiding principal that I could manipulate white balance, a bit of exposure, and maybe a crop, but the image had to be what was there, not some beautiful creation of mine in post. Not doing much of that at this time, and just starting to explore capturing a digital image (always in RAW) and then bringing it into the computer and seeing what I can make with that image. And not trying to make it a "true/honest photograph" of the moment, but more of an image that is pleasing or exciting to my eye. Kinda fun, and freeing.

But always RAW.

Best,
-Tim

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I would write my own firmware for the camera if the source code and development tools were available. It would record raw pixel values as they come off the a/d circuits. Store meta-data for post-processing.

To me, JPEGS are like shooting slide film and projecting the results. "The Dye is Cast".
Uncompressed Raw images, greater pixel bit-depth than 8-bits, required to boost shadows, change curves, almost for any change in intensity values.

I use JPEGs to document procedures, processes, how-to illustrations, technical papers etc. Images that I would have used a Polaroid "back in the day".

 

[Ko.Fe.]

The only boss is the content. If content is present, it is picture which will stand out by been taken in jpeg1 and mobile phone.

https://www.rferl.org/a/symbolic-pi...llies-sold-for-2-million-rubles/31091664.html
Money went for charity, BTW.

 

[Dogman]

Uh..., excuse me (taps on shoulder). You do know you can do all those Lightroom manipulations to a JPEG as well as a Raw file, don't you? Just in case you didn't know, you can. That's what I choose to do. The difference is I let the camera process the Raw file image into a JPEG within the parameters I input and then I take that JPEG file and finish the job in Lightroom. Yeah. You can do that. You can even shoot color JPEGs and make B&W from the original file. Just like Raw. I dodge, burn, bleach (in a way), adjust exposure, highlights, shadows, sharpness, grain, add or subtract vignette, the whole darkroom ball of wax. I can even do cloning/healing and adjust contrast, sharpness, etc., in selected areas. In other words, everything I ever want to do. And they make beautiful prints with Epson pigment inks on archival art papers. Better prints than I could print in the darkroom using film.

After years of nothing but Raw, I switched to JPEGs. Fifteen years ago, JPEGs looked kinda crappy. And the files fell apart after a few generations of copying and manipulating. But today they look great and hold up to lots of fiddling in software. Maybe if you do extremely fine technical work or make prints the size of a Greyhound bus you might need big Raw files to work with. But, me. I just take pictures for pleasure and print them no larger than 12x18 inches to hang on the wall or pass around to friends.

Give the JPEG a little respect.

 

[willie_901]

Uh..., excuse me (taps on shoulder). You do know you can do all those Lightroom manipulations to a JPEG as well as a Raw file, don't you?

One can not do "all those Lightroom manipulations to a JPEG" unless:

• Exposure was perfect
• The light for the scene was dominated by a single source - i.e. a single set color temperature parameters apply to the entire image

The less these two conditions are met, the more limited Lightroom, JPEG manipulations become. The reason is JPEG lossy compression removes information content - forever. More informative data reduces the consequences of sub-optimal exposure on image rendering aesthetics. More information enables superior color rendering for regions illuminated by light with different color temperatures.

With the newest cameras, in-camera JPEGs are more flexible than ever. This is because the signal-to-noise ratio of newer cameras combined with their 12 to 14 bit depth per channel provide more information content [1] It does not mean in-camera JPEGSs are just as good as raw files with the same SNR and bit-depth.

Give the JPEG a little respect.

Why not give raw files little respect? Retaining all the data your camera recorded is a sacrifice that prioritizes preserving information content over convenience.

That said, what does deserve respect is the choice to use in-camera JPEGs. After all, before digital imaging photographers choose to use transparency film which eliminated the inconvenience of wet-chemistry color film development and printing.


1. Even though JPEGS are limited to 8 bits per channel, raw files with higher bit depths produce superior JPEGS.(link)

 

[ptpdprinter]

Are there any advantages to jpgs other than they are smaller in size and more convenient to post directly to social media? Does anybody make prints from jpgs, and if so why?

 

[Dogman]

Perfect exposure? Not necessary.

I shot this yesterday from the car using a Nikon D800 and a Zeiss Planar 50/1.4 lens. The lady was in shadows except for her face which was in filtered bright sunlight coming through her windshield. Thanks to the D800's big files, I cropped. A lot. Admittedly not a great photo but you get the idea.




I'm not sure how this will look online but it's my almost white dog on a black chair. The image has detail in the shadowed black chair while still holding detail in the light-colored dog. This with a Fuji X-Pro2 and a Voigtlander 40/1.4 lens.





White walls, white dog, groomer in black. No special metering, just adjusted the exposure, shadows and highlights in Lightroom. And there's still detail in the black uniform and in the highlights on the white dog's back. Fuji X-Pro 2 with a Voigtlander 21/4 Color-Skopar lens.




All these print well. Perfect exposure is a misnomer to me. I don't do "perfect".

 

[Dogman]

Are there any advantages to jpgs other than they are smaller in size and more convenient to post directly to social media? Does anybody make prints from jpgs, and if so why?

The advantage for me is definitely the file size. I shoot a lot of pictures and I download them all to edit them. My iMac is getting old and it's slowing down. The smaller file size is a plus for me. Especially with the D800/D810 cameras--I use the Fine/Medium size for them.

I don't do social media.

I print most of my photos using an Epson P700. Why would I not print them? They look great in print, even those that are cropped. There's a limit, of course. I limited my darkroom printing to 11x14 for all my 35mm negatives because that was about the limit for Tri-X at the time.

 

[ptpdprinter]

The advantage for me is definitely the file size. I shoot a lot of pictures and I download them all to edit them. My iMac is getting old and it's slowing down. The smaller file size is a plus for me. Especially with the D800/D810 cameras--I use the Fine/Medium size for them.

I don't do social media.

I print most of my photos using an Epson P700. Why would I not print them? They look great in print, even those that are cropped. There's a limit, of course. I limited my darkroom printing to 11x14 for all my 35mm negatives because that was about the limit for Tri-X at the time.

If you do not notice any difference in quality between prints from JPGs and prints from RAWs for the sizes of prints you make, then I understand your reasoning for shooting JPGs instead of RAWs. Smaller files are faster to download and edit.

 

[Pál_K]

One thing that I enjoyed in the old Photo Technique magazine was they would have two different professionals independently print from the same negative. Often we’d get to see two very good but different looking prints which reflected what the photographer thought about the image and wanted to portray. I suppose the same is true of digital: we each have preferences that sometimes require manipulating a raw image; for others jpeg is more than good enough. I’m in the latter camp - usually I tweak only brightness and contrast a small amount and even then it’s more to get the final print to match what I see on the monitor.

 

[Richard G]

I shoot raw and jpeg: always jpeg with the Fuji X100. Ocasionally jpeg in the M9. The Monochrom raw files can’t be compressed so they’re 34 MB to the M9’s 18MB but I find it more difficult to choose to cut any corners with that remarkable camera.

Currently I’m importing files into a Lightroom folder for 2020. I’ll do something about that in the New Year. And I’ve never mastered the keyword complexities so my filing consists of denoting my medium format stuff and the rest is hope for the best. As is my dwindling hard drive space. And my desk is messy, but not as messy as five years ago.

The arguments for raw are unassailable and the guilt about jpegs here obviously causes more silent suffering than we know. Few have Dogman’s courage to come out. My more recent guilt is not having chosen uncompressed raw for the M9. Turns out I’m losing something. Maybe we need an inferior image capture format support group?

But of course the boss here is right about the final image and needing to work a little to get there. Bit like with slides, sometimes it’s already done.

 

[jsrockit]

I use raw. I like post processing and I like the ability to change my files to my taste as it inevitably changes over time. However, film, jpg, raw, etc. Who cares? What really matters is the photo. A great photo can be made with any method.

 

[ptpdprinter]

However, film, jpg, raw, etc. Who cares? What really matters is the photo. A great photo can be made with any method.

I agree that you can make a great photo with any method. However, it seems a shame that a photographer would buy and use high quality cameras and lenses and then throw away a significant portion of the captured data by saving, editing, and printing images saved in a lossy format. Of course, if you don't see any differences, then it doesn't matter. Even though I save, edit and print using RAW, I export JPGs from the edited RAWs and post them to the web. If the web is the ultimate destination for your images, except to the extent a JPG may not be as malleable to edit as a RAW, then working in JPGs does make sense.

 

[Axel]

...
And, to again be honest, that jpg is pretty much the digital equivalent of the film world’s drugstore print that filled family albums and made a lot of people happy. And yet, unmanipulated jpgs straight out of the camera don’t make me happy. And the digital equivalent of a darkroom makes the wet darkroom’s exposure and contrast selection, burning, dodging and bleaching quite easy. Why bother with all those adjustments?
...
Your thoughts?

My experience is different. I can not follow the comparsion of jpgs with drugstore prints.
A print is an end-product, drugstore-prints are like contactprints for just to see what´s on the film.
A file always has the function of the former film. And it is no question of format or extension.

And so it goes on. A "digital darkroom" is the place where photographers see and manage their pictures.
There are so much variants how this takes place today - from complete smartphone over tablet to desktop computer -
so any comparsion with the old darkrooms for film-photography will simply fail.

For me any jpg I have done since the first digital shot has enough potential to realize corrections or manipulations.
If I want. I just did a shot through 2 windows for documenting the frozen mood outside my house.
A little auto-correct levels in GIMP and the pic was done. Shure jpg.

...(Indeed, some news organizations want out-of-the-camera jpegs because they are more “honest.”...

If this rule really still exists today I won´t research how many photographers simply copy their own set of EXIFs to
any self-created picture 😉

I am the boss of my pictures and their creation. Today more than ever.

 

[robert blu]

I use raw. I like post processing and I like the ability to change my files to my taste as it inevitably changes over time. However, film, jpg, raw, etc. Who cares? What really matters is the photo. A great photo can be made with any method.

i could not express my idea with better words!

 

[jsrockit]

I agree that you can make a great photo with any method. However, it seems unfortunate that a photographer would buy and use high quality cameras and lenses and then throw away a significant portion of the captured data by saving, editing, and printing images saved in a lossy format.

Today we have jpegs that are very good. You might theoretically be throwing away data, but if all you have is a great photo in jpeg form, nobody is going to care. It is still a great photo. Nobody is going to wonder what could have been if it was RAW. In film we had minox, 110, polaroid, holgas, 3200 speed film etc. None of these were exactly high fidelity. Yet someone out there has made beautiful photos with all of them.

 

[Dogman]

Again conversely, when a photographer uses a high quality camera he may trust it to process the files more correctly than a third party Raw converter. Just sayin' (as they say).🙂

 

[ptpdprinter]

Again conversely, when a photographer uses a high quality camera he may trust it to process the files more correctly than a third party Raw converter. Just sayin' (as they say).🙂

My camera came with a copy of the manufacturer's software, but I use LR and PS instead to edit my RAW files. There used to be a great debate about which RAW converter, including the manufacturer's, worked best with my camera's RAW files, but that seems to have died down. I've never seen any kind of image file that couldn't be improved, so I edit all the files I print or post anyway. When an image comes up either in the tray or on the display, the first question I ask is: "What can I do to improve this image?"

 

[jsrockit]

I've never seen any kind of image file that couldn't be improved, so I edit all the files I print or post anyway.

Post processing is completely subjective. What you think needs improvement could be perfect to someone else. I mean, look at the high contrast b&w Japanese photography vs. the grey & more grey currently popular in the US art world. Both are considered great photography.