I'm confused

[ssim]

I love my new 10D but I have a question about shooting in RAW.

You end up having to save this as a JPG in any event if you want to edit. So really what's the point.

Am I missing something here.

On a side note I got my 16-35 2.8L yesterday. Very nice lense.

[ssim]

Further to this, I am going to the Montreal Grand Prix and am curious as to which format I should shoot in. I have 2 1GB cards. I have a laptop that I can take with me to upload in case I run out of space. Is RAW the way to go?

Hate to sound like an idiot but I want to get this one right.

[cowman345]

Well, shooting in RAW is really a personal preference, but before you decide what's right for you, let me explain a bit more about RAW.

RAW lets you have the greatest versatality in the end as far as being able to adjust white balance, and everything else you can set in-camera. JPEGs don't have this versitality.

Secondly, if you save in JPG format, every time you save you lose more picture data. RAW is itself a lossless format and can be converted to TIFF which is also lossless.

Once I'm satisfied with the adjustments I've made to a RAW file, I save it as a TIFF and edit it in Photoshop, once i'm finally all done, I'll save it as a JPEG once and ONLY ONCE! this way there is minimal data loss, hence much better picture quality.

Check out the post about Africa for a HUGE and LENGHTHY RAW discussion:

http://www.photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=10930

[CyberDyneSystems]

ssim,
RAW gives you the quality of a TIFF file but at about one half to one third the file size in camera. Once the 4mega pixels cameras came out TIFF as an in camera file option started to become ridiculous. Even my old 2 megapixel camera made 9-11 megabite TIFF files!!

If you want to keep the quality,. convert your RAW to tiff on the PC.

A question?

If you have the RAW plug in and Photoshop 7,. do you need to convert it at any point? Can't you keep it as a RAW file? Or does this just allow PS to Convert to TIFF/jpeg,.. etc. ???

[robertwgross]

ssim wrote:
I love my new 10D but I have a question about shooting in RAW.

You end up having to save this as a JPG in any event if you want to edit. So really what's the point.

Am I missing something here.


Yes, you are missing some details. Shoot and save in RAW format. That is a pretty small file size on the CF card. Then transfer it to your main computer and convert it to a more standard file format. You have several alternatives, but the most common two formats are TIFF and JPEG. By the way, I archive my RAW files off to CD-ROM for safekeeping.

(1) I always convert mine to TIFF, and then I "refine" it in my image editor, e.g. Photoshop, Photopaint, etc. TIFF format is a non-lossy format, so you have all of the data to refine with that you may want. From there, I can print or do anything I want, and the file size stays big and perfect. It takes up hard disk space, but hard disk space is especially cheap these days.

(2) Once all editing and refining is done, then often I will convert the TIFF file into JPEG, but that is only for a few reasons. JPEG tends to be a lossy format, and sometimes you can see the loss, and sometimes you can't. If I need to stick a rough image on my web site, then JPEG is the way to go. If I need to send a photo as an email attachment to a friend, then JPEG is the way to go. Once you have converted to JPEG (and that bit of detail is thrown away), you can convert back to TIFF, but you will never get all of the detail back.

(3) If somebody wants to purchase a print, then go back to the file created in step (1) and print from TIFF.

By the way, there is a side-step to TIFF. There is a compressed form of TIFF which is called TIFF-LZW. With some images, the TIFF-LZW will take up less space then the real TIFF. It takes a tiny bit more processing time to compress and de-compress it. This works good if the image is not a photo, like some business graphic, pie chart, or bar graph. However, for most of what we here in the Canon group do, which is the digital photograph, TIFF-LZW often does not save much space. In some cases, the TIFF-LZW file actually takes slightly more space than the real TIFF (due to the compression header/overhead). So, I have mostly quit using TIFF-LZW.

Right now I have one directory with about 35GB of TIFF images. Then other directories much smaller with JPEG and other formats.

I can still remember my first computer in 1987, and it had a 10MB hard disk.

---Bob Gross---

[PaulB]

If you can follow the Africa Shots thread then there are some cogent arguments in there which may help.

However I lean towards the JPEG side of the argument because of what and how I shoot. Others feel differently.....

[Longwatcher]

Me, I shoot in RAW, because it allows me to scale prints to large size without jpeg artifacts creeping in.

I used to shoot in RAW for portrait and jpeg for fun, but I found that

1. RAW is not significantly larger (yes it is 4 times larger, but with a 120GB HD and only 8MB per image, I have to take over 10000 images in RAW to even get close to filling the drive up. Even transfering them to CD-R results in an average of 100 images per CD-R at 80 cents per CD* an average month of shooting costs me about $8** plus electricity and the occasional print.

2. More important, I took what I think is a really nice picture and at 13 x 19 (largest on Canon S9000), it shows the jpeg artifacts, which annoys the heck out of me. At 16x24 they would be even more pronounced.

3. Using Photoshop with ACR makes it easy to use RAW and I only convert to jpeg for the web or others to view.

4. As a former image analyst, Unless it is over 12000 pixels by 12000 pixels, I am not happy ;-)


Trivia:

* That includes buying at not the cheapest place and with jewel cases, I can get it to under 50 cents each if I go for cheaper.

** Yes that translates to an average of over 1000 images per month. Some months more, some months less. When I have a model over I average 400 images per shoot, I try for two per month and then some random shots.