Hey Sports Shooters!!

When I shot sports with my old 400D starting out, I was shooting JPEG. Then the last time I used it for sports, I made the mistake of turning up the sharpness and contrast in-camera and they were absolutely terrible. When I got my 1D classic, I left it in RAW all the time simply because I had no firewire cable to fix the parameters but I didn't mind that because they were the size of a large JPEG anyway. I'm getting a 1D2 this week so the sizes will be a bit bigger... hopefully now that I can use SD cards as well, I might buy a few more and shoot RAW all the time. I'll definitely shoot RAW for the first month or so until I have figured out good JPEG settings, if at all.

I tried switching to JPG when I got my MIII. For the high light recovery alone I switched back. I shot a 3:30 afternoon baseball game with white unis.in RAW+JPG to see the difference and it was enough to go back to RAW. For those who say "get it right in camera" have never shot afternoon high school sports.The dynamic range is off the charts and every little bit of help I will take.

Glenn the file size will be about 8meg.

For me, it depends on the event and those I'm catering to.

If its pros I'm shooting and there is a good chance at big $$$ ... I'll shoot RAW+ JPEG.
If its just the kids in the hood, I'll shoot only jpeg .... unless the paying customer requests otherwise.

.... sometimes it depends on the "conditions" also.

I shoot a lot of surfing ... and if the waves are really, really good, I'll shoot RAW+JPEGS.

After reading the comments before mine, it seems like the choice is like picking the color of a new car. Individual choice.

I shoot everything in RAW. The only time in the last three years I didn't was when I left home like an idiot without my stack of memory cards and had to borrow a 1GB card from a fellow shooter and needed to keep file sizes down.

JPEG is a compression process so even your original image from the camera has lost some of the original data. If you open it and change anything and resave it, even at a max setting, you are adding a second level of compression and losing even more original data. Granted, this is not really a major issue with the high performing sensors but my thinking is why throw away any of the information the gear I paid big money for captured to delay having to add a new $150 HD by a month or to keep from having to spend $29 for another 4GB memory card.

If meeting a deadline is the main goal, as it is for those who shoot for wire services, newspapers or magazines, JPG is the format that will be used.

A deadline photographer in the field needs to get an image to a photo desk as fast as possible, usually before an event is over. For publications, photographers don't edit and process images, editors do. Since there's no such thing as a universal RAW format, and since a publication is likely to have photographers who use several different kind of cameras, JPG is used.

After taking pictures, deadline photographers spend their time selecting pictures, writing captions and uploading images, not editing. Images are processed by publications' photo desks so they look good on a printed page, not for a computer screen.

DC Fan wrote in post #8506817
If meeting a deadline is the main goal, as it is for those who shoot for wire services, newspapers or magazines, JPG is the format that will be used.

A deadline photographer in the field needs to get an image to a photo desk as fast as possible, usually before an event is over. For publications, photographers don't edit and process images, editors do. Since there's no such thing as a universal RAW format, and since a publication is likely to have photographers who use several different kind of cameras, JPG is used.

After taking pictures, deadline photographers spend their time selecting pictures, writing captions and uploading images, not editing. Images are processed by publications' photo desks so they look good on a printed page, not for a computer screen.

This is what a good portion of my work is for. Since I do all the selections and captions in Aperture it does not make any difference if they are RAW or JPEG originals since it does not change my workflow at all but RAW sure makes my life much easier when I am shooting volleyball in a gym with 30 year old lights and the WB is varying 1500K from frame to frame.

The four papers I do work for expect me to also do the editing as well and if they have to do anything besides crop and sharpen I will get a very unpleasant cellphone call within 10 seconds of submission. Maybe if they were the NY Times or Washington Post it would be different but here in small market Indiana the photographer does almost all the heavy lifting.

While they all want JPEGS the extra 15 seconds it takes to change the final output from RAW to JPEG has yet to keep me from meeting a deadline.

Sports Illustrated instructs photographers to shoot both RAW and M1 and my limited experience with wire services also required most of the editing to be complete before submission. The final publication will make their adjustments to optimize printing but they still expect the original to be properly toned with correct WB.

For shooting sports I dont find an advantage to shooting in RAW. RAW files take up much more space on cards/ hard drives and your continuous buffer drops significantly when you shoot in RAW as opposed to jpegs.

If you shoot in RAW for the post processing control you can get the same control with jpgs by processing in Lightroom or if you go into Adobe bridge you can right click on a photo and click "Open in Adobe RAW" to get the same controls as you do with RAW files

Also, in photoshop, you can go to....
Preferences > File Handling

CS3 - click the box that says open JPEGs in Adobe RAW (or something to that effect)
CS4- Click "Camera Raw Preferences" at the bottom under "JPEG and TIFF handling" select "automatically open all supported JPEGs"

This I understand ...but do you have the same information and ability with those controls? The files take up more space for a reason...right?

As far as the speed thing I can import,adjust/edit and export basically at the same speed as .jpegs so I dont really see the advantage there...maybe if your covering the olympics and trying to get the first 100m image sent

Dan-o wrote in post #8506095
Glenn the file size will be about 8meg.

I thought they would be but I was more referring to the fact that SD cards are a bit cheaper but hopefully fast enough for whatever I throw at it

This was a very interesting thread to read. Thanks to all for info on pro/con of shooting RAW vs JPEG, and various post processing options. I learned a lot.

However, I didn't see one point mentioned and that is the varying ability between bodies to produce sharp JPEGs. Both my 40D and 1DII bodies are rumored (according to what I have read) to be unable to produce sharp JPEGs out of the camera, regardless of parameter / picture style settings, in comparison to the sharpness one can get out of sharpening the RAW versions.

If this is true, does this make a difference in your decision to shoot RAW vs JPEG, strictly from the sharpness point of view?

Typically when shooting anything that will be used for advertising or large format when shooting sports, I will shoot both raw and jpeg so that I have both areas covered. When using for just for online and newsprint(magazine) jpeg will be fine. Just my 2 cents!!!

SnapLocally.com wrote in post #8490905
Not only do I strictly shoot in jpeg, I don't even use the highest quality setting. It may help when shooting at ultra high iso's, or when significantly underexposing shots, but I find most situations just don't need it.

On my mk3 I shoot M1 size jpeg set @ quality level 8. I can't transmit images larger than 4mb, it bogs up the server and slows the editors in the office down. For sports, I don't really see the need for making pictures in raw.

SnapLocally.com wrote in post #8490905
Not only do I strictly shoot in jpeg, I don't even use the highest quality setting. It may help when shooting at ultra high iso's, or when significantly underexposing shots, but I find most situations just don't need it.

hmm, I may need to try that out

I don't know any "event" shooters that shoot RAW and I don't know any wedding photographers that shoot JPG - Each brings a benefit to the appropriate shooting environment. When I shoot for some of the big national sports photo companies (no need to drag names in here) they require photos to be shot at 2MP Medium compression. Anybody that doesn't think those files make a nice 8x10 image is a .... very picky person.

The difference between a wedding and sports is that with sports you are shooting from much more of a fixed position. You may wander a bit but you'll have to the chance to dial in your exposure for the changing shot. With a wedding you go from taking a flash picture of the bride getting ready indoors to a picture under full sun outdoors as she gets into the limo... and it all happens very fast. In that environment the chances of a screwed-up exposure are much higher and RAW is a blessing.

Photo volume at a sports event is a perfectly good reason to shoot jpg as long as you know how to expose your image properly. I shot a big marathon last year where I took 6000 (and there were 20 photogs working that day) in 7 hours. I don't even know how much space that would have taken in RAW but since I didn't screw up the exposure on any of the images it would have been a waste anyway.