It is said that the serious photographer shoots RAW only. That makes sense. The amount of dynamic range we lose from a JPEG format is huge -- compare 8 bits per pixel in JPEG vs 12 or 14 bits per pixels in RAW format. I assume the serious photographer has a lot of time on his/her hand to tweak the RAW data to produce the right JPEG.
I am not writing about the RAW vs JPEG format because I do not have much experience with RAW and there are enough articles out there with all kinds of tests to show that there is really no difference for the untrained eye. Being that it contains more data, RAW should produce images with higher contrast and better defined colour ranges -- imagine shooting the sunset. I would however draw from reading those articles that it would depend on your post-processing software how the final photo would turn out. If you have a crappy software that does not know how to make the best out of the RAW data, smoothening out curves for example, you would get crappy results. If your camera has better built-in image processing than your software, then I'd like to shoot with in in-camera JPEG format. You cannot imagine that being the case though, right? Any professional software should have more capabilities than your camera image processing firmware; would the Gimp fit in this category?
What I am interested in is, your real world experience. Do you shoot in RAW only format, or RAW+JPEG, or only JPEG? Do you shoot RAW for archiving purposes, given that it does contain a lot of data?
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If you are a PRO you shoot RAW, that is what every single photography book author says. I am not a PRO, but one day I would like to take good pictures, like a PRO. That is why I started shooting RAW a few weeks ago. I really want to get use to it. I have been doing some testing, for example shooting raw and jpeg at the same time and then converting the raw to jpeg without doing any adjustment. After comparing the two jpeg pictures I find the converted picture from raw a little bit better than the jpeg.
ReplyDeleteUsing DPP (Canon software) to convert raw to jpeg takes 10 seconds for each picture. I usually convert lots of 20 to 50 pictures at the time, so I don’t wait more that 5 minutes (8 min for 50). I you want to convert 200 pictures you have to wait at least 30 minutes.
Is all this waiting time worth?, I think it depends on how many pictures you take every day and if you want many possibilities for post-processing as possible.
I really like to hear from the experts, where are the experts? .... (: