Shoot raw or not ?

egordon99 wrote in post #8897582
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.

Yep, I see what you mean...but on the flip side..if you are shooting raw NONE of your menu selections on image processing is being done leaving you to do it all yourself. I find my workflow so much easier shooting jpeg..I just make sure there is something white in every image so to properly do a white balance..you can load your jpegs in bridge...just make sure you have your jpegs to open up in the camera raw editor and you are all set.

Bobster wrote in post #8897764
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

I don't have enough trouble with those things, thus JPG.

(But if I were in a situation where I was really struggling, I like knowing that I can switch. I also would do differently if I were doing photography jobs, making very large prints, or only took a few hundred pics a month.)

egordon99 wrote in post #8897480
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.

Never irreversible....the camera's "little" processor is more powerful than you think..plus the camera engineers are smarter than I am so I let their engineering knowledge process the image and I'm very happy with the results and so are my clients.....

Shooting wrote in post #8897813
Yep, I see what you mean...but on the flip side..if you are shooting raw NONE of your menu selections on image processing is being done leaving you to do it all yourself. I find my workflow so much easier shooting jpeg..I just make sure there is something white in every image so to properly do a white balance..you can load your jpegs in bridge...just make sure you have your jpegs to open up in the camera raw editor and you are all set.

And so what? I have defaults setup in Bridge (or you can use DPP which will read the "as-shot" PictureStyle) I don't have to do it "all" myself. I get a starting point, just as I would had I shot JPG with a PictureStyle. The difference is when you shoot JPG, you're locked into THAT PictureStyle (with its associated contrast/saturation/sh​arpness). Shooting raw allows you MUCH MUCH MUCH more control over contrast/saturation/sh​arpness.

I think I changed the PictureStyle to B&W just for the heck of it at one point. It made the preview JPG B&W, but that's it...All the ORIGINAL 14-bit sensor data was retained in the raw file.

Shooting wrote in post #8897872
Never irreversible....the camera's "little" processor is more powerful than you think..plus the camera engineers are smarter than I am so I let their engineering knowledge process the image and I'm very happy with the results and so are my clients.....

Switch to the B&W PictureStyle. Shoot JPG. Try to "reverse" the B&W into the original "color" data in ACR

hollis_f wrote in post #8897429
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.

Sorry, I didn't know that during an informal discussion, proper punctuation and capitalization were a requirement.

egordon99 wrote in post #8897885
Switch to the B&W PictureStyle. Shoot JPG. Try to "reverse" the B&W into the original "color" data in ACR

That has just recently become significant to me, as I only recently discovered that Canon's monochrome Picture Style is very nice. So I use it, still shooting in raw, for the benefit of seeing the subject in black and white while shooting and getting the initial black and white "as shot" view in DPP. Sometimes I'll see a need to adjust tonal values in Photoshop, but very often...not.

^I should try that for a shoot, just to see if it affects my shooting "style"

I really don't do much (if any) B&W.....

Shooting wrote in post #8897872
....plus the camera engineers are smarter than I am so I let their engineering knowledge process the image.....

No doubt about the camera engineers being smart.

Problem is, they had no way to know what I'd like to get from a particular capture when they designed the camera I bought. If I never deviated from what they estimated the majority of users preferred, then their algorithms would always be spot-on for me too.

agedbriar wrote in post #8898692
No doubt about the camera engineers being smart.

Problem is, they had no way to know what I'd like to get from a particular capture when they designed the camera I bought. If I never deviated from what they estimated the majority of users preferred, then their algorithms would always be spot-on for me too.

That is why there are menu settings..you take a shot and tweak your settings to give you what you want from your camera.....I don't need to process every image in front of a computer like you have to do raw....I'd prefer to shoot..I set my camera and shoot away knowing all I have to do is download to a pc, crop and I'm done...very little post to do since my camera did it all for me according to the settings I set.

But to each his/her own...

You don't have to do much processing in front of the computer if you don't want to. In DPP, just click "select all," click "batch process," and click "okay."

You can adjust images shot in JPG. You can adjust images shot in RAW. For well exposed images, you probably can do as well in editing JPG as you can in processing RAW. But you can do more with RAW, and you have a wider range of adjustment. A course that demonstrates those priciples would be high value.

ssim wrote in post #8887797
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.

YankeeMom wrote in post #8897513
I shoot JPG and I do a little PP on each photo.

I didn't say you could not edit a jpg I said that people shoot raw because it is a more advantageous format for editing. There is no disputing that fact. So, if you don't shoot in RAW you don't care to have the full PP possibilities open to you.

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.

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

Wow, I thought I was the only one. Actually only shot raw for 2 years.

Most of the arguments against JPG were valid 5 years ago. But, as I oft say, to each 'is own.

Yossarian22 wrote in post #8900839
I didn't say you could not edit a jpg I said that people shoot raw because it is a more advantageous format for editing. There is no disputing that fact. So, if you don't shoot in RAW you don't care to have the full PP possibilities open to you.

That's especially true if you do quite a bit of pixel editing. All my portraits go through a large amount of retouching, and it takes a 16-bit file to stand up to it.