x100 - RAW or JPEG?

[rbelyell]

Sure, but are you going to switch from JPEG to RAW and back and forth when your lighting varies from shot to shot?

I guess if you are a challenging photographer you have little choice but to shoot RAW. If you play it safe, ensure lighting is always 'compliant' etc then there is no need.

You can always work a RAW file towards the JPEG your camera would have produced, but you cannot always work a JPEG towards the file you would have produced from RAW....

when i say 'difficult lighting' i typically mean 'artificial' lighting. typically, that doesnt change from shot to shot. when i'm inside in artificial light and pictures are critical, i shoot raw. 99% of other times i shoot jpeg-no going back and forth.🙂

 

[rbelyell]

I'd add that with a very small amount of thought, LR or the like can be set up to squirt out your RAW files pretty much however you want, so you can get out what the camera JPEG would have been with the click of a button.

Besides, we can shoot RAW and JPEG together. I know I do.... Aside from quantum speed, I cannot see any reason not to have those RAW files there just in case. You can always delete them!

While I understand the point about lots of people not being professionals, that's no argument, because the point here is that Ken Rock suggested, as supported by Nick Trop, that there is 'no point' shooting RAW unless you want to spend your time tinkering for the sake of tinkering. That is patently untrue and there seems to be consensus on the idea that if the highest standards are your goal, esp if the lighting is nasty, RAW is the way to go!

as they say in the states 'i'm from missouri, you've gotta show me'. 🙂

some folks like to tinker for the sake of tinkering, i think thats great, go for it and have fun spending hours futzing with your raw files to get them to look pretty much like my jpegs.

some folks believe jpegs destroy critical information without exactly knowing what that information is or how it effects IQ. again, fine, enjoy filling up those hard drives!

some folks, like me, have never seen, actually seen with their own eyes, side by side prints of the same simple scene made from raw and jpeg where there was any noticeable difference between them. in fact, this kind of observation actually showed us no discernible IQ differences. until we actually see real IQ differences, we feel everything else is fantasy.

 

[gavinlg]

some folks, like me, have never seen, actually seen with their own eyes, side by side prints of the same simple scene made from raw and jpeg where there was any noticeable difference between them. in fact, this kind of observation actually showed us no discernible IQ differences. until we actually see real IQ differences, we feel everything else is fantasy.

I took some photos with my x100 the other day in a national park with my girlfriend. The WB on the camera was on 'auto', 'provia' and highlight/shadow settings on 'std'. The photos I took in JPEG came out too warm, and far too green. The skin tones on my girlfriend were almost sickly yellow. Adjusting them in lightroom to get a decent balance proved very difficult - mainly with the cast on the skin tones. They were ruined.

Luckily I had the raw files too - I made a quick adjustment to wb, bumped up the red/yellow/orange luminance and then batch corrected the rest of them. Literally took about 20 seconds total for about 40 photos.

Raw 4 lyfe.

 

[celluloidprop]

for the space this argument engenders, the definitive conclusion is quite easy and objective to achieve. shoot the same normal scene at the same time raw and jpeg and try to find a difference in your prints. unless youre postering a wall with them, my bet is you won't be able to find any noticeable difference. if you do, that would be worth hearing about!

I will guarantee you that I can "find a difference" between any OOC monochrome JPG that I've used, and one I've edited in LR3/Silver Efex Pro 2.

 

[jsrockit]

I like it RAW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHkRHiEjt8I

 

[umcelinho]

raw keeps more info on each file than a jpeg will do. time goes by and raw processors get better and better, unlike the in camera jpeg converter. so i just shoot raw even if sometimes i just take a look on the files on lr3, am pleased and export them to jpeg right away.

 

[Bike Tourist]

I don't wish to micromanage my pixels. For me, jpeg works fine, allows me to integrate files from different camera brands, withstands several iterations of manipulation, is fast and uncomplicated, and is my digital buddy.

Of course, I have low standards.

 

[paulfish4570]

if i can ever figure out how to process RAW, maybe i'll have an opinion on this ... 🙂

 

[Richard Berter]

Same goes for me Paul

 

[Photosynthetech]

I started shooting raw+jpeg with the jpeg in BW. For me it is easier to get the color photos the way I like them with RPP, and the BW jpeg helps he decide if the photo will work better in BW or color having seen both.

 

[andy_v]

X100 is my first digital camera I prefer to shoot jpeg with.

 

[gavinlg]

Heh.. I've been going back and forth on this issue now since I bought my x100. I'm shooting raw+jpeg currently. After some more experimentation, I've started to change the simulation modes depending on the light - provia mode for very contrasty and harsh light, astia for most situations (but with the color toned down) and velvia for very very flat light. Likewise the highlight and shadow options get moved around a bit - usually I leave them on med-hard for provia, and then make them softer as I go to astia and velvia. The white balance is also really crucial - really warm scenes can trick the auto WB, so I try to set it as one of the presets most of the time. This helps with accuracy a lot.

There is definitely something quite amazing about the x100s JPEG engine - sometimes I literally cannot match the colors and tones with a raw file. When the JPEG engine 'overcooks' the colors on a file I've learned exactly how to tone them down selectively in lightroom, and the results are pretty damn good. I bought the fastest sandisk card available (90mb/s) and it's helped a lot with the write times when shooting raw+jpeg.

So yeah, I've backflipped again and most of my published photos from the x100 are jpegs (with the RAW files there as backup for important stuff).

 

[gavinlg]

Also - I've noticed in Astia mode a tendency to clip shadows a bit - which I actually really like as it reminds me of a positive film scan. Sometimes there's a richness to the astia JPEGs that's really strong and pleasant - like in this photo:

 

[Deep Fried]

X100 blows the white balance in mixed light too often for me to trust it. Indoors with mixed flourescent, halogen and incandescent, it will pick some wacky things sometimes.

Also, for a lightroom user there is zero difference in amount of work required for raw or jpeg. It makes it a non issue.

Yes, raw file colours are flatter. I find this to be true of all digital cameras I have shot raw. The thing is, I want to choose what to do with the colour.

The other big issue for me is creating tone curves for B&W highlights. You can't get nearly as nice highlights when trying to work over a jpeg.

 

[kbg32]

"f i can ever figure out how to process RAW, maybe i'll have an opinion on this ... "

This is a problem with the majority of digital shooters. If they knew how to process RAW files, they would never use a jpeg again. Take your time, ask questions, experiment, find a friend, buy a book......

 

[rbelyell]

Also - I've noticed in Astia mode a tendency to clip shadows a bit - which I actually really like as it reminds me of a positive film scan. Sometimes there's a richness to the astia JPEGs that's really strong and pleasant - like in this photo:

gavin, ive found that astia is to my eye simply a less sharp, slightly less saturated version of 'velvia'. it has been pretty well documented that the velvia setting severly clips shadows, so no surprise astia does also, though less severly. i set 'shadow tone' to 'soft' when shooting velvia, and that seems to alleviate the clipping problem.
tony

 

[dreilly]

Any thread that starts with an early evocation of Roddy Piper and "They Live", moves on to Ken Rockwell, and then produces this gem from MrbessaR4a:

"The jury was done on RAW in 2006. JPEG is a distribution format, RAW is a capture format. Don't waste your camera and shoot JPEG. It's not archival, it's not full quality, it's not maleable, it's mostly stupid. JPEG is for ebay sales and iPhone cameras."

...is, well, my kind of thread. Incidentally, there is a very good couple of posts on The Online Photographer about just this issue. Worth reading.

I'm a JPEG shooter, so much so that I've sold cameras because their JPEG processing sucks. I come from a slide film background, and never minded working within the constraints of slide, and certainly don't mind the much more considerable lattitude a you can get from a digital file from a camera with a fine JPEG engine (which is Olympus, Epson and Fuji in my book, Canon and Nikon is usable but not particularly endearing).

But I am convince enough by this argument about "losing information" that I will only shoot with an extreme wide-angle fish-eye lens from now on. That way I'm capturing more information and discarding less.

Someone up above wrote:

"Personally, I wish reviews would spend more time assessing in-camera processing..."

I totally agree with this. There are better JPEG engines than others. JPEG engines are like film stock and deserve a little more analysis and experimentation.

I've only had the x100 for a week or so but so far I'm enjoying the JPEGs. I did a shoot last weekend with the x100 and shot RAW+JPEG just to see the difference, and by far I liked what I got from the JPEGs with minor tweaks vs. what I could do in LR3 with the RAWs and much more significant tweaking, which took me more time, and since I don't like postprocessing (and generations of photographers had little to do with pp, the slide shooters I mean), then the less time I spend on that the more I can be out making images. I look for a camera like I would choose for a film stock, something that helps me match my vision. The X100 seems to fit the bill. Any Olympus camera does. The Epson R-D1 had the best I've ever seen.

It really depends on the person. I shoot JPEG. My images end up in a magazine. Others do too. It certainly wasn't decided in 2006.

To directly address the OP's...O.P....I was using Astia with medium-soft shadow and medium highlight, I think the color was bumped up one or two.

cheers
doug

 

[Deep Fried]

raw. exported from Lightroom as jpeg with no adjustments

In camera jpeg velvia setting

 

[Deep Fried]

That's why I shoot raw boys and girls. At the end of the day you still get a jpeg but there is a big difference in what that final jpeg looks like

 

[dreilly]

Deep Fried,
One comparison a successful argument does not make. The Velvia setting is by all accounts not the optimal one.
doug