To RAW or not to RAW (that is the question)

[FlyWoody3]

To All,

Boy is this hobby addicting. Anyway, I've made the upgrade to Photoshop CS and looking for some advice. I currently shoot with the file setting on High quality. I shoot alot of sports pictures of the kids and set the Drive Mode to Continuous. I was wondering if there is any impact to moving to the RAW format and does it impact the speed of taking pictures versus the High quality setting. Any experiences with the differences (or not) would be appreciated.

Don (FlyWoody3) :?:

[CyberDyneSystems]

You did not say what Camera,. But I'll assume either 300D or 10D :)

1st,. it will efect your burst speeds,. only after you full the buffer. in other words,. on the 10D you will get the exact same 9 fromes straight at 3 fps,... with RAW or jpeg,.. BUT if you shoot RAW then after those 9 frames your wait to shoot again will be longer with RAW.
That said,


YES! You SHOULD be shooting RAW! :mrgreen:

Now that you have Adobe CS working with RAW files will be a breeze,. and I tell you,. the first time you open a quality image with interesting lighting into the RAW utility of CS you will be blown away by the flexibility and magic you can work with your images!

Just go out there late afternoon and get some photos as the sun is low in the sky... and try RAW with CS :)

[FlyWoody3]

CDS,

Yes I have a 10D and two 1Mb CF cards. Most of the time I'll be shooting less than 10 frames in Continuous Mode. Thanks again for the info.

Don (FlyWoody3)

[Vegas Poboy]

The RAW file format takes longer to upload than the large Jpeg files. When I shoot track & Field events and things go so quick I have to shoot in Jpeg to keep things rolling. For Pee Wee Basketball games I shoot RAW since the little guys move slower. I also shoot @ the Drag strips & on those events I can get away with RAW since it takes time for cars to start after each light goes off.
So I can say it all depends on the sporting event that you're shooting. But RAW files takes more time to store to the card.

[Chazs]

One thing I found out about my camera (S40), taking night shots, i.e., of the Northern Lights, Moon, stars, campfire, etc., in jpg, is that increasing the overall light in PS created significant banding when the camera was set to jpeg. In RAW mode I can increase the exposure of the picture to nearly white without banding. I'm still not sure what is going on with the compression to jpeg. But, if I'm taking a picture in low light I always opt for RAW now instead of jpeg. (Actually , I only use RAW now to avoid the preprocessing of info for each picture. I'd rather do it in PS)

[toddb]

After I got CS, I don't shoot anything but RAW. You can easily adjust one RAW image and apply that RAW property changes to as many other RAW images as you want. You can batch just about anything you want to do. If you are going to do any touch up work or major resteration from a bad shot, the RAW is soo much better.