Shoot raw or not ?

YankeeMom wrote in post #8958778
I am editing my jpegs slightly but I just don't have the knowledge or confidence to switch yet. I do VERY slight editing -- like cropping, mild sharpening and maybe a boost of contrast. That is it most of the time. "Developing" RAW data is more intimidating to me. I have DPP and I am intimidated by the dials and buttons.

If you shoot in raw then you can use DPP to create a jpeg exactly the same as the camera would have produced with very little effort (especially if done as a batch process). You can also use it to do your minimal processing and just ignore all the other bits. The advantage of doing this is that, as your processing abilities improve you can go back to those raw files and re-edit them.

I have a bunch of images I took on my first Africa trip, when I'd only had my first dSLR for a couple of months. They were all shot in jpeg and I just know that some of them would be much better if they were raw. All those lovely bits and bytes were thrown away and I'll never be able to use them.

YankeeMom wrote in post #8958815
This is merely an argument against those, like Poloman, who state that if you shoot in jpeg, you do not really care about your photos and to others who imply that you cannot get good results without RAW or are not making good use of your DSLR.

It is no question that you can create fantastic photographs without ever touching RAW. Your camera does the conversion for you. I listed the technical advantages of shooting RAW in my previous post, so I won't repeat them here again. I didn't mention any artistic merit of that format as it has none. Neither has JPG by the way. I do think that not shooting RAW you do not use some of the capabilities of your camera, but who else but you can say you need those capabilities at all?

As for me I always wanted to use only RAW long before it was feasible to do it. (It may have something to do with the fact that i developed and printed my BW photographs in the pre-digital days) But with my Nikon 5700 or Sony F828 a single raw file needed 16-20 seconds to save and during that time I couldn't take another photo. So I used JPG instead almost exclusively. I edited all of my JPGs and were usually happy with the result. Now I only shoot RAW and I am happy with it.

What I want to say that everyone should give a try to using RAW, to play the controls with the raw converter and see what happens.

PP skills are acquired skills, so you can get them by doing PP. And please don't think about PP skills and RAW as only means to salvage terrible photos! Think about them as means making an already good photo even better. The leeway that RAW provides may be invaluable.

There are not-so-serious WB problems which you can't discover at shooting time and can't correct with JPGs without loosing much of the tonal range. And there are the unique moments you may loose because of bad WB. It happened to me once, when I was shooting JPG that I forgot to set the WB to 'flash' and it remained on 'tungsten'. I corrected the setting after a single shot, but that frame came out blue. It was a shot I would have hated to loose (newborn child and her mother) so I tried everything to get the colors back. It took me about an hour to get colors resembling to the real one, but it was far from perfect. This would have been one click with a RAW file in an editor for a perfect result. So yes, RAW is also an insurance policy.

This is an example of how shooting in RAW can help you. The left picture is the auto white balance shot. You can see that while the color of the outside world is correct the hand turned gold, Of course I could have set the white balance to the hand, but then the outside world would be blue (middle photo). The picture on the right is what I saw. In such situations it is impossible to take a single shot where all areas have the correct WB. The right photo therefore is a combination of the other two, which are in fact the same hand held RAW shot converted with two different white balance settings. With JPG this either would not have been possible, or would have required a lot of work at the scene (two photos with different WB settings, camera on a tripod)

I know 2 professional wedding photographers who shoot jpeg only and their jpegs blow away some other pro's raw. Now that I have made the same raw editor white balance selections as presets, I can open jpegs in the raw editor and then change the white balance as needed..not as fine tuned as raw but better than not.

Shooting wrote in post #10990375
I know 2 professional wedding photographers who shoot jpeg only and their jpegs blow away some other pro's raw. Now that I have made the same raw editor white balance selections as presets, I can open jpegs in the raw editor and then change the white balance as needed..not as fine tuned as raw but better than not.

The truth is that the image processor built into the canon cameras and the software running on it are no dummies and produce very good-looking jpegs.

The problem comes in if you want to heavily postprocess things in several steps, then you can quickly run into the gaps between the bits that remain after you threw away low and high values in sections of the picture. And the initial white balance correction is the first of such steps.

I have a picture of a Orang-Utang from Toronto zoo that I shot against the light. It's a toss picture but I still like it for the way he/she is looking at me. But the whole face's surface is in a narrow sub-range of the total range, and in the jpeg that's very few bits. If I had shot it raw there would be more details of the face that I could then work out in PP (after lots of noise cleanup...). Not to mention there's probably blocking and other jpeg artifacts in there.

I shoot RAW only when White Balance is critical particularly when under incadescent lighting.