Shoot raw or not ?

I know this is a big topic. I know there are differening opinions. I am about to teach a one shot (oops, maybe a pun) class on raw. Trying to keep it as non-technical as possible and non-camera specific. Would welcome some simple inputs. Looking for times, situations, subjects that call for raw or not. Think beginner here.

Well fundamentally, people shoot raw if they plan on processing their photos and shoot jpgs if they don't know how or don't care to pp

Presumably, I would assume most potential RAW shooters would look have some time behind the viewfinder, as well as on the computer. Where are your students coming from?

You might want to point out that shooting raw is basically creating the negative from which the jpeg will be rendered. It contains the most amount of picture data and as the camera processes, data is lost never to be recovered. Maybe their skill set is not matured enough to fully utilize a raw to jpeg work flow now, but by only saving as a jpeg, little adjustment can be made. At least if they saved in raw+jpeg, somewhere down the line when their skill set improves they still have the negative to go back to

+1
Also... you may not want to shoot RAW if you are in a situation that demands you take so many shots, so fast, that you are filling up your buffer.
I have never been in that situation. I would rather time my shots. Most of the sports I do is equine and I think I do better timing the shot than spraying and praying.

Excuse me, you can still do processing of jpegs....just not as elaborately as raw. I shoot jpeg and process in CS3 RAW editor...get it right in the camera and you just have to crop and tweak and you are all done.

But everyone has their own requirements and workflow. I actually like letting the camera process the image to what menu items I set..I'm happy with them.

Yossarian22 wrote in post #8886525
Well fundamentally, people shoot raw if they plan on processing their photos and shoot jpgs if they don't know how or don't care to pp

I have to respectively disagree with this statement as a generality. While it could apply to some, I would hate to see this statement made to a class of beginners.

Certainly the RAW files will help you recover from some misjudgments at the time of shooting. If you nail your exposure at the time of shooting having the RAW file for this purpose is somewhat negated. There are many variables that one has to consider as to whether you should take the additional time to shoot RAW. Time is the one thing that shooting in this format does take. I've shot full weddings in jpg as I didn't feel the need to have that comfort level of having the RAW file as a backstop to any errors I could potentially make. I've shot at times in JPG where I would have loved to be able to shoot RAW because of time constraints in getting the deliverable to the customer. These are only 2 examples of the sort of variables that one has to consider when deciding to shoot in RAW or not.

As far as being able to post process the JPG to the same extent as a RAW there is some validity in that but don't confuse the new comers that you cannot edit a JPG to a pleasing end result. You certainly can and can do it without destroying the original file. Definitely if you don't want to do any post processing shooting in JPG is the way to go and further I think that just about everyone that starts out in digital probably starts with JPG and migrates to RAW in fairly short order.

One has to take the time to decide for themselves what they are shooting as to which format they should shoot in. With all things being equal and no constraints I would choose RAW.

Well, I shot raw for 3 years and left, will never go back. The only thing you cannot really adjust for a jpeg in the raw editor is the white balance..but I make sure I have something white hidden in each image so doing the WB (if ever needed) is so easy..or just do a custom white balance and you are all set.

RAW is ok and I in no way am cutting it down, Myself I see no need for it.

I have students come to me and ask about statements they have heard like: ",,,you are not a professional until you shoot only in raw... "

Going back to the original post...

gasrocks wrote in post #8886517
I know this is a big topic. I know there are differening opinions. I am about to teach a one shot (oops, maybe a pun) class on raw. Trying to keep it as non-technical as possible and non-camera specific. Would welcome some simple inputs. Looking for times, situations, subjects that call for raw or not. Think beginner here.

I shot RAW for the first time this last spring. It was for a personally important shoot. I'd had the XSi for less than a month and had only played with RAW on some test photos. I did the shoot. Then I went through the almost 400 images I'd taken that day. I went through them, knowing I'd have to convert the entire bloody lot of them to jpeg eventually. "What's the point?" I thought. That changed when I saw the first image I wanted that was far off in white balance. In the past I'd done white balance correction on a jpeg in GIMP, an involved task, that. This time with the RAW image I used the eye dropper in DPP, chose a neutral section, and voila, a yellow photo was quickly and easily corrected. What portended disappointment turned into satisfaction. The second one was artistic and also off on white balance. A bit of correction yielded the treasure that lay within the sensor data. Now RAW made sense. Most every photo I've taken since then has been in RAW. The exception is when I've been in a consistent lighting situation and needed to shoot in continuous mode.

To me it's less about situations and more about the thought that I could lose a great photo because I've tossed the original. I'd say show them the types of images that can benefit from being taken in RAW, and the good students will eventually discover when to use RAW.

always shoot raw. always

Coming from a still relatively newbie photographer, I really like the negatives idea. It's always nice to have the power to alter images however you want in the future. The only downsides I see to shooting RAW is that is takes up a lot of space and if you are not looking to edit the shots at all it will be more time consuming to convert them all.

To me, it's a matter of approach to photography.

Shooting JPEG, you use your experience to determine in advance the settings that will yield the image you have visualized. If you you miss occasionally, you fix just those obvious issues in PP. Delighted as you may be with the results, you never really know if the job could have been done better, just slightly perhaps, but still worth doing.

With RAW, you determine the settings by checking their effect in real time on the monitor. You optimize them for every single picture and finally settle for the values that give you the output you like best. You may even get to a result that you like more then the visualization (often sketchy) you had at the time of shooting. At the end you know you have obtained the best result the capture could offer.

Shooting wrote in post #8887642
Excuse me, you can still do processing of jpegs....just not as elaborately as raw. I shoot jpeg and process in CS3 RAW editor...get it right in the camera and you just have to crop and tweak and you are all done.

Get it wrong in the camera and you stand a chance of rescuing the image if you've shot in raw. Here's my example of the difference. So I'll keep using raw until I get it right in the camera every single time. That day I'll switch to jpeg and go outside to photograph the pigs flying past.

Shooting wrote in post #8888209
Well, I shot raw for 3 years and left, will never go back. The only thing you cannot really adjust for a jpeg in the raw editor is the white balance..but I make sure I have something white hidden in each image so doing the WB (if ever needed) is so easy..or just do a custom white balance and you are all set.

The white balance issue was the initial factor that turned me permanently to raw even before I was well-accomplished with post processing. The first time I forget to reset the white balance when a session moved from open sun to shade, I realized that was an error that I could permanently prevent. White balance is the only error that raw does permanently prevent.