Shoot raw or not ?

Morlow wrote in post #8889278
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.

When I was shooting film and printing both color and black and white in the darkroom, the greater freedom to manipulate black and white was immensely significant compared to what I could do with color. Too much manipulation of color negative processing or printing, and the color layers go hopelessly out of balance. To me, the difference between what you can do with JPEG and raw represents something similar.

Granted, a lot of people shot transparencies and and were happy to do no post-processing at all, but for me, the darkroom work was much of what my art was about.

Yes, I can imagine someone who used to do darkrooom work, and loved it, as liking raw. New question: Other than change/correct WB, is there something that can only be done in raw conversion that cannot be done in processing a jpg?

Restoring clipped highlights.

René Damkot wrote in post #8890777
Restoring clipped highlights.

Yup, like I said in my earlier post.

Example here (again).

general rule of thumb i go by is, if i want to have a backup gameplan for in case my picture doesn't turn out the way i want it to, i'll shoot raw. if the images aren't all that important to me (e.g. i'm clicking away taking sunset shots at multiple aperture/shutter speed settings, just to check them out later on my pc and see which i like best), i just shoot jpeg. i shot family portraits for both sides of my family the past two weekends, and for those i definitely shot raw. i've been experimenting with DPP and photoshop elements "camera raw" to see which i like better/which works best for me.

hollis_f wrote in post #8890799
Yup, like I said in my earlier post.

Example here (again).

That is what the burn tool is for also...you can restore a lot of clipped highlights in jpeg using the burn tool...and also using the Recovery tool in camera raw for the jpegs..yes you are limited in what you can recover but even raw has it's limits on highlight recovery..a good rule of thumb..meter for the background and/or highlights before you shoot and it is easier to deal with....what you can't recover in recovery, burn...

gasrocks wrote in post #8890741
...New question: Other than change/correct WB, is there something that can only be done in raw conversion that cannot be done in processing a jpg?

Preserve color graduations (smoothness of color). With jpegs once the conversion happens almost 1/2 of the color data is gone with the conversion. You go from either the 14 bit or 12 bits of raw data to 8 bit jpeg. All those color graduations are gone, never to be recovered. As you manipulate the jpeg it is very possible that you are loosing even more color data. With a raw file you are working with the full color set and as you make adjustments some of that data is lost but you start with so much more that it's much less noticeable. The second is that as you save jpegs, edit them, re-save you start to loose quality.

To the OP: is this class aimed at discussing Raw vs jpeg, or at discussing the Raw workflow to students who are already aware of the benefits of shooting Raw?

Shooting wrote in post #8891039
yes you are limited in what you can recover but even raw has it's limits on highlight recovery

Very limited. That's why nobody could get anything from the jpeg I linked to.

PS. You may need a new keyboard. The 'shift' key appears to have failed, while the '.' key is obviously sticking. It does make your posts quite difficult to read.

I paste this "essay" into any post from a beginner wondering about whether or not to shoot raw. Perhaps it can help explain to your class WHAT raw is and why you might want to (or not) shoot raw.


First off, your camera ONLY shoots RAW. When you select JPG, the camera takes the RAW data and pipes it into its on-board JPG processor to generate the JPG "image" to save to the card.

When you shoot RAW, the RAW "data" goes directly to the card and is not an image.

To generate an image, you use a RAW processor (software on your PC) which turns the data into a viewable image, much like the camera's JPG processor. The difference is that YOU have complete control over the image generation process. You can change the white balance, adjust the contrast/brightness/bl​ack point/etc....

So you can leave these decisions up to the camera's little processor (and hope it makes the right decisions since they are irreversible), or save the decisions for later where YOU have complete control over it.

And if you want to get VERY technical, you can bring up Bayer Demosaicing

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 shoot JPG and I do a little PP on each photo.

i feel like i can't ditch RAW now that I've tried it. wondered why my 6 years with G-series cameras never involved RAW =[

Shooting JPG would wreak havoc on my workflow (Bridge/ACR/CS3)....

During shoots, I have enough to worry about with composition, lighting, shutter speed, ISO, f-stop, focus...allowing me to not worry about WB is nice. I do tend to take a shot of my grey card though if the lighting looks funky.

ssim wrote in post #8887797
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.

i've been editing jpgs for the past 17 years and while it is possible to break a JPG easier than a RAW its by no means uneditable.. just some things are easier to do with a RAW file vs JPG

white balance, recovery of highlights etc