Lens Envy

I love raw. What a negative film is to a film shooter is what a RAW file is to a digital shooter. Its a huge deal. I shoot it, because i have enought space to store it.

I dont process every image from RAW, it takes forever. BUT, I do process thoes "amazing shots" i get for print.

The ability to convert to a TIFF for lossless editing is HUGE. I got 2000 GIGs of computer storage tho, but even with all my shooting, I get yet to fill up 300 gigs of photos.

RAW is gods gift to digital shooters. Either you can do it, or you cant. And if you dont understand the advantages of shooting RAW and post processing, you might as well just keep shooting JPG. White balance alone is one of the most amazing features. To shoot something B&W, and be able to retrive color data is amazing. Exposure correction + or - 2 stops from the "time you took the photo" is also huge.

shooting in raw, is the difference beteween salvaging a perfect shot gone bad, vs loosing it forever, or having an inferior photoshop recovery edit.

i dont shoot everything in raw, but there is a time and place to use it. For a wedding, its your safty net.

Oooo ya, and I forgot, I got tons of computer, hard drive, color calibration, and post processing tools including printer profiles. Post Processing RAW can be more taxing than shooting the image itself. Its like a job in its own.

I consider myself not just a photographer. But a digital graphics artist. I handle many trades that go along with photography. Printing, Post Processing RAW = "developing" as in film, color management is another crazy thing in its own. ect...

Ansel Adams would have shot RAW.
Really, I'd bet that he would have, were he shooting today. But remember that he was a darkroom guru as well as a photography guru - his shots didn't end at the corner lab. He was, and still would be willing to spend a great deal of time working his images in the darkroom, digital or otherwise.

Me - I shoot RAW, though there's many situations where I really don't need to do so. It's in the difficult lighting situations that RAW really comes through. You get at least an extra stop (closer to 2) of headroom which can be very useful when you need to recover highlight detail. You do have more room to play (or for error) when shooting RAW. RAW does have its advantages, though processing speed isn't usually one of them.

That's a good analogy... those that enjoyed spending time in a dark room probably enjoy spending time in Photoshop, etc. I can certainly see the need for shooting JPEGs and skipping post, as the photographer, almost altogether.

With batch conversion I don't see why everyone complains raw takes too long. Pick out the few that are worth the extra work and batch the rest.

Tom W wrote in post #2198049
Ansel Adams would have shot RAW.
Really, I'd bet that he would have, were he shooting today. But remember that he was a darkroom guru as well as a photography guru - his shots didn't end at the corner lab. He was, and still would be willing to spend a great deal of time working his images in the darkroom, digital or otherwise.

Me - I shoot RAW, though there's many situations where I really don't need to do so. It's in the difficult lighting situations that RAW really comes through. You get at least an extra stop (closer to 2) of headroom which can be very useful when you need to recover highlight detail. You do have more room to play (or for error) when shooting RAW. RAW does have its advantages, though processing speed isn't usually one of them.

you bet he would have shot in raw...maybe even 50 shots in one day .

ed rader

Good points on both sides, but there doesn't really need to be two sides here. I shot my last wedding in RAW, I shot my last football game in JPEG medium, and my last candid job in JPEG large. I shoot according to the job, but 90% of my jobs, to include studio work, are JPEG jobs.

Print size is a consideration, but color does not enter into it. The vast majority of labs require images to be in sRGB, this means no fancy "extra" colors, so RAW need not apply, but, for total output clarity on a 20x24 print, a RAW will most likely win over the JPEG, even if it is by a small margin.

Saving a shot because it was improperly exposed is a great excuse to not learn proper exposure. I have learned to ignore my in-camera meter and to NEVER trust aperture or shutter priority, I will use these on occasion, but I do not place all of my faith in them. My hand held meter and knowledge of WHAT to meter and WHEN to meter now play the dominant role in my exposure decision. (for example, metering for the grass minus 1/3 stop after the sun has set for a night football game, perfect exposure every time, just watch for the "dead zones")

I am not accusing anyone of not knowing how to meter, I just think that the "fix it later" attitude leads to piss poor photography. If I cannot show my client the image as soon as I take it, with confidence, then I have failed as a professional.

As for white balance, this is another fall back that can be corrected before you shoot, and even after with JPEGs with the correct software. Grey cards do work, I use them daily. Not only grey cards, but I had my lab print a card (8x8in) with white, black, red, green and blue on it, and then mount it on gator. This is my reference card for most jobs, I shoot the card with the grey in the middle for custom white balance, and keep the image in case I need to reference it for later color adjustments in PP. When traveling light, I keep a pop-open grey card that I just shoot on site and make my custom WB.

Power Retouche has an awesome WB correction tool that works great on JPEGs when you forget to do a custom WB (oops...) or if you simply don't have time because shooting conditions change too quickly.

As for PP time, batch is just one more step that can be eliminated. Time is always against the shooter, every step that can be removed from the PP is time saved, and this means that the editor, or the lab gets the images faster. Check out this quick site I threw together for a charity event at a local school. I shot all JPEG, and I put in about 30 minutes of PP to toss the OOF, and non-story telling images. I cropped a few and generated the web page. The site was up the next day, and the client was thrilled, time is everything.

RAW has it's place, as I stated, I shot my last wedding in RAW, knowing that the bride wanted "over the top" artsy images, you know, the over-processed kind that are so gaudy that they almost hurt the eyes to look at....yeah, that's what she wanted. Well, I work for money, not principle, so I did as she wanted, and shooting RAW gave me the ability to jack around with exposure, levels, and saturation in a way that I could not with JPEG, so RAW made sense.

I feel that this will always be a debate, and there is no correct over-all answer, but, in most situations, JPEG serves it's purpose very well, and those of us who shoot it everyday and create salable images from them are proof.

I want that 24-70L that's sticking out of the guy's bag

Long primes don't really do anything for me. Yeah they're nice and expensive, but not suited for what I shoot.

rabidcow wrote in post #2198460
Saving a shot because it was improperly exposed is a great excuse to not learn proper exposure.

Agreed.

However, one benefit of RAW that is not discussed is greater dynamic range. For a lot of wildlife work, for example, you need as much DR as possible. And "getting it right in camera" is not as good as "getting it as good as possible in camera and then making it better in post-processing."

And when you are doing a lot of tonality changes to manage extreme contrast situations, the 16 bits of RAW file make a big difference.

This is off-topic, but IMO, unless you do exclusively incident metering, there really is no difference between using an external vs an internal meter. As long as you know what your meter does and when to over-ride it, the end results are the same.

I have been using aperture priority with exposure compensation, and rarely have lost a shot, even back in the Velvia days.

That I agree with.

This holds true for anything photographic - there is no putting in extra money/effort unless you know you need it or are working towards some goal.

I was reading the thread about the 85/1.2 where someone was claiming that professionals buy the "best there is." Speaking purely for myself - and to some extend, some other people I know who also rely on photography for their daily bread - I buy the cheapest product that meets my needs re. image quality, weight, robustness, etc. Things like a red band around the lens or "comfort of knowing I own the best lens possible" mean absolutely squat. I get my "pride of ownership" glow from the results, not the tools.

Vandit

vkalia wrote in post #2195703
For print sizes of 16x20 (a fairly normal output for me) or larger, RAW helps

How does RAW help when producing large prints, if the resolution is the same? I thought it all dpends on the dpi.

StealthLude wrote in post #2197744
To shoot something B&W, and be able to retrive color data is amazing.

What's the point of this though? If you shoot in JPEG and colour, it's easy to convert to B&W. So I wouldn't say that's an advantage.

sugarzebra wrote in post #2195099
No, neither guy was using a custom white balance, just set to cloudy, which they said was perfect for shooting surfers. It warms up the colours alot though. I believe that Bryan Peterson recommnends doing the same thing on bright days, just for the warmer tones......makes us old Kodachrome slide guys feel better

Thank for the tip!!!

rabidcow wrote in post #2198460
Saving a shot because it was improperly exposed is a great excuse to not learn proper exposure.

When you've got a scene with 10 or 12 stops of brightness and your JPEG only captures 8 stops, you will either lose highlight detail or shadow detail - there's no magic. Shooting RAW gives you additional dynamic range so that you can take more or all of the original image and curve it to fit within the confines of the 8-bit JPEG image.

Tom W wrote in post #2199788
When you've got a scene with 10 or 12 stops of brightness and your JPEG only captures 8 stops, you will either lose highlight detail or shadow detail - there's no magic. Shooting RAW gives you additional dynamic range so that you can take more or all of the original image and curve it to fit within the confines of the 8-bit JPEG image.

If you have that much contrast in a scene then surely the image can never look good, no matter how much adjustment you try. You can expose the hightlights properly or the shadows, but not both.

curiousgeorge wrote in post #2199865
If you have that much contrast in a scene then surely the image can never look good, no matter how much adjustment you try. You can expose the hightlights properly or the shadows, but not both.

Grad NDs and Photoshop Merge-to-HDR FTW!!