Which format? Raw or jpg

I use DPP to pre cull my RAW files before importing into LR. Quick Check - Full Screen. Years ago I wondered why DPP looked so good and why I couldn't get the final Jpegs to look as good with any software. Took months to find the answer. DPP's downsizing algorithm for 'fit to screen' display is very good - contrasty which creates the illusion of sharpness. For better words you are basically looking at a Jpeg in that mode.

DrMitch wrote in post #18798246
I've been trying to get better at purging the garbage pics and only keep good ones - I keep them in RAW - I've found my post-processing styles change a bit over the years and it's nice to have a bit more freedom with processing images...

Same here. I'll shoot an event in raw then load them in my pc and delete the junk photos. It helps to free up hard drive space. From the raw keepers I use Canon's DPP to process the photos and save as jpeg. But not all raws, just those I'm interested in.

I usually don't delete my raw keepers. I figure some day I'll move from DPP to LR/PS so I might want to process the raws again.

So I went out and shot a handful of photos, a couple old barns and some ducks, just to try out RAW vs. JPEG that I have been shooting in since I started shooting photos a couple of years ago. Download them on to my Mac and then look at them in Photos. I can see that they are in RAW and much larger, 21-22 MB per photo as opposed to the usual 3-5 MB when shot in JPEG. But when I mess around with the editing functions in Photos (which is all the post processing that I have ever done), I can't really tell any difference between what happens with the RAW photos and what happens with the JPEG photos that I have shot before. Maybe you can only really tell a difference using a more advanced processing program such as Lightroom? Based on this trial, I can't see that I gain anything for the kind of stuff that I usually photograph? Maybe just to novice to notice a difference.

duckster wrote in post #18822291
So I went out and shot a handful of photos, a couple old barns and some ducks, just to try out RAW vs. JPEG that I have been shooting in since I started shooting photos a couple of years ago. Download them on to my Mac and then look at them in Photos. I can see that they are in RAW and much larger, 21-22 MB per photo as opposed to the usual 3-5 MB when shot in JPEG. But when I mess around with the editing functions in Photos (which is all the post processing that I have ever done), I can't really tell any difference between what happens with the RAW photos and what happens with the JPEG photos that I have shot before. Maybe you can only really tell a difference using a more advanced processing program such as Lightroom? Based on this trial, I can't see that I gain anything for the kind of stuff that I usually photograph? Maybe just to novice to notice a difference.

A jpeg is simply a processed raw file written out in jpeg format, nothing more. However, a jpeg file is also a compressed, 8 bit version of the raw file. Most of the information that was captured at the time you pressed the shutter button has been discarded. The color information has been reduced from either 12 or 14 bits per pixel to 8 bits. Also, the image has been compressed so depending on your compression level, jpeg artifacting starts showing up.

If you are happy with the jpeg, then fine, no need to do more. If you need to do some adjustments or wish to process the file differently, it's hard to do with the limited jpeg data without the photo degrading rather quickly, but it's easy to do with the raw file.

duckster wrote in post #18822291
So I went out and shot a handful of photos, a couple old barns and some ducks, just to try out RAW vs. JPEG that I have been shooting in since I started shooting photos a couple of years ago. Download them on to my Mac and then look at them in Photos. I can see that they are in RAW and much larger, 21-22 MB per photo as opposed to the usual 3-5 MB when shot in JPEG. But when I mess around with the editing functions in Photos (which is all the post processing that I have ever done), I can't really tell any difference between what happens with the RAW photos and what happens with the JPEG photos that I have shot before. Maybe you can only really tell a difference using a more advanced processing program such as Lightroom? Based on this trial, I can't see that I gain anything for the kind of stuff that I usually photograph? Maybe just to novice to notice a difference.

RAW photos permit a greater range in the manipulation of various parts of the histogram. For example, you can increase the Shadow areas to be brighter than they would be without adjustment; then you can also reduce the Brightness of the Highlights. Here is a simple example of that. On the left is a manipulated RAW, while on the right is the as-shot rendition.

Thank you for the information/explanatio​n. Maybe will have to take the same shot, one in JPEG and one in RAW and then work with them both to see the differences. Probably the shots today were not great representations of what is possible as we have a lot of snow, so a lot of white in the photos.

duckster wrote in post #18822408
Thank you for the information/explanatio​n. Maybe will have to take the same shot, one in JPEG and one in RAW and then work with them both to see the differences. Probably the shots today were not great representations of what is possible as we have a lot of snow, so a lot of white in the photos.

This is the perfect setting to test the difference between raw and JPEG. If a scene you are shooting has a lot of bright sunlit snow in it, your camera's meter will read the average scene accordingly and then give you the suggested setting that will make that scene middle gray. So, your snow will be underexposed (mid gray) compared to what it should be (close to white). Your JPEG will capture the snow in all of its bright wonderfulness, at the expense of shadow detail. This is a function of the metering, not the raw versus JPEG. In this kind of case, you would want to add exposure to make the snow white. And this is where the JPEG versus raw file will start to reveal the potential benefits of working with the raw file.

When you shoot to compare the raw versus the JPEG, your camera probably has a setting that will permit you to capture the raw and JPEG files simultaneously - set your camera to raw+JPEG and you do not have to worry about shooting everything twice (1 raw then 1 JPEG). The two image files will be made together and you can compare apples to apples.

Try shooting a sequence of exposures, each time increasing the exposure by slowing down the shutter speed (letting more light in). The JPEG will keep getting brighter and brighter and, eventually, the snow will be overexposed and clip to pure white, losing all detail in the snow. Shoot the scene with some trees, or the shady side of a house or something that has deep shadows as well as bright snow. This will provide you with a scene that has a wide dynamic range (difference between brightest white and darkest shadow). As you increase your exposure, you get better shadow exposure (less noise, more detail and better color), but your whites and highlights will clip in your JPEG- in your raw file, those highlights will, up to a point, still be there in the data and you can recover them in a raw converter like Photos.

The JPEG that comes from your camera is made from the raw file that your camera captures. Engineers for the camera companies decide what processing takes place on the raw file to produce the JPEG - the camera has no idea what the scene is that you are shooting and how you want it to look, so it does the same thing to each and every image, not caring if it crushes shadows or blows out highlights. In scenes where there is a large swing between shadows and highlights, the JPEG converted in camera will potentially throw away some of the data that the raw file has preserved when applying the arbitrary JPEG conversion algorithm. If you shoot to capture the raw file, you get to decide how the conversion is performed by processing the raw file on the computer after the fact.

Give it a try - what it sounds like you have observed is that, for the scenes you shot, there was little benefit to shooting raw - that is perfectly fine! If you want to start exploring the potential benefits, try to capture scenes that will challenge the camera's JPEG engine.

Have fun!

kirk

Thank you for that information! Will give it a go.

Shooting raw provides the following benefits:

- If you use DPP, it will honor your in camera settings so you know immediately what you had set up when you took the picture.

- You can choose to undo any in-camera setting other than the highlight priority, that actually affects the raw. This means you can go change the picture style, exposure slider, reset the white balance, change the high ISO NR settings, etc.

- If your JPEG shows blown highlights, it is possible the raw actually doesn't have the blown highlights, just that the resulting JPEG had it based on your camera settings.

- It is easier to reset white balance, it is easy to mass edit raw files to reset exposure down or up, etc and have it recreate the JPEG

- Raw files are your digital negatives. You could convert to DNG or TIFF lossless as well if you want, instead of JPEG, and then save those files instead of the JPEG and/or raw.

- The raw files have a full size JPEG already embedded. You could shoot just raw, and then use tools that are known to extract the JPEG file, so that afterward you just run that on all raw files, and that will save space on the card as you are shooting.

In cases where you have a great handle on the settings and exposure for the shots, there isn't always any real benefit to having the raw. I have situations where I have a custom setting set up, and I could just shoot JPEG, I haven't gone back to a raw file in quite some time in this particular venue over 50 games from the past 2 years.