Why Shoot in RAW???

[Wooglah]

When you share pictures with your friends, convert them to jpeg. Actually, on some cameras you can shoot RAW+jpeg, and then use RAW if you want to process them further, or jpeg for quick viewing and selection, sharing, ...

[kirbinster]

Raw let's you recover imperfections that you could never recover in a jpeg. A blown highlight that is totally lost in a jpeg may be recoverable in raw. Trashed your whitebalance in jpeg -- too bad, in raw it does not matter you can set it after the fact. The only time you should shoot jpeg is when you are in a studio with perfect lighting control -where you can nail the exposure every time, or when shooting action shots where you need to get absolute maximum frame rate --- other than that it is raw all the time without a question.

[vandergus]

There is almost no reason to use a DSLR if you don't use raw!

You guys are so silly.

[velvet4269]

RAW has rescued many a photo, and allowed me to get photos in conditions I may not have otherwise been able to (reptile house at the zoo, for example ... low light, no flash allowed, and really messed up lighting conditions). I'll stick with RAW+JPEG, thanks

[Swisstony10]

A couple of years ago I was given a free Mediterranean cruise by my sister (she works for a cruise company) and because I knew I'd take a shedload of pictures, I finally made the step of upgrading from my trusty (and fabulous) Canon Eos film to a 400D, because I wanted to be able to take the same kind of pictures I'd take with my SLR, but with the convenient storage of my digital compact (which was an extremely cheap one that took poor-quality pictures).

I didn't get the whole RAW/Jpeg thing at the time, having only just bought the camera, and I didn't want to be experimenting on my once-in-a-lifetime holiday pictures, so although I stuck mainly with manual settings, I had it set to record them as Jpegs.

On the lovely island of Mykonos I took some pictures of the famous Mykonos windmills. It's a lovely picture - but when I tried to print out a nice big version of it, I found that the camera had made some truly appalling decisions in the processing, which didn't show in a normal 7x5 print. The white balance is only slightly off, and isn't too bad, I can live with that, but in the sharpening process it's given me a lovely fringe around the fins of the windmills that make it look like a very bad 1980s blue-screen special effect. That's something that I would've been able to avoid in the processing, but it's something that can't be undone.

While I know I could spend the best part of a day whittling away with Photoshop to get rid of the fringe around the windmill fins, I've got better things to do with my time.

The main problem, in my opinion, with letting the camera make all the processing decisions is that they can't be easily undone. Now, I know that they're terribly clever, and that in many, if not most cases, DSLRs make sensible decisions when they process an image to Jpeg, and on some models you can influence those decisions, but if it does anything that you don't like, it's really hard to undo it. With RAW, you make the decisions after you've taken the picture, and if you don't like them, you haven't affected the initial image.

Russ.

[wulf]

Was that a problem of the processing or the optical effect known as "chromatic aberration"? If you take a shot of a subject against a bright background, you often get side-effects including purple fringes - the problem varies depending on light, lens and focal length.

If it was the optics, shooting RAW images wouldn't have helped in that instance. To be honest, for my purposes, I am happy shooting in JPEG mode. I'm pleased with the results I get and haven't been able to improve on them when I have experimented with the RAW mode on my D40.

Wulf

[maxharvard]

Yea, wulf is right CA has very little if anything to do with the style it's saved as, it's more of a lens/flare/lighting/cosmic forces issue.

[Swisstony10]

That's a good point - it could well be Chromatic Aberration (I was probably using the kit lens, after all). Photoshop CS3 has a little palette of tools that deal with CA to an extent though, when you're processing a RAW file - will that work on a Jpeg image too?


And to quickly drop in something in favour of Jpeg - last year my sister-in-law asked if I'd take pictures at her wedding, mainly for the period after the official photographer had gone. I set the camera to save the pictures in RAW and Jpeg together, and that meant that I was able to give her a CD the next morning at breakfast with all the pictures I'd taken on it, so she could let me know which ones she wanted to have as "keepers", and then I processed and printed those ones from the RAW file. Both formats working in harmony there.

I'm just not an awesome photographer, so I have to rely on RAW to give me some headroom for error-correction.. ;-)

Russ.

[kirbinster]

I've never really understood why people shoot RAW+JPEG. When you use a program like lightroom you can import the raw and quickly convert the entire stream to jpeg with any sort of batch adjustment you might want. So why waste the storage space on the jpegs? Further, there is a program called Instant Jpeg from RAW that will extract the jpeg that is embedded in the raw in a batch mode and the jpeg is of fairly decent size and quality on my Nikons.

[PnwGuy]

When I'm shooting for fun or experimenting I just use jpg. Easier to process and you definitely still get great shots. If you rely more on getting the settings and exposure right for the shot, you don't need to worry so much about the PP. I don't print much so it's not that big a deal to me.

If I'm shooting for someone else, or if I'm shooting something that is important to me, or if the lighting is tricky or is a combo of indoor and outdoor, I shoot RAW.

Just like every other hobby/profession, everyone has a little different approach and opinion and the only thing that matters is what works for you.