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Gday all,

I am wondering what the fuss is about RAW. I am pretty sure I have asked before, but before you answer, some background about me.

I love to go out and try and get good photos. Really, thats the really enjoyable part. Once I get home, I have a quick flick through them in iView, grab a couple of goodens, give them a 30 second touch up in PS (usually +5 contrast and 20% USM), then upload them to Flickr. Now, even that amount of PS is too much imho.

Now, what benefit am I going to gain from RAW? I went out to take some piccies of a 2 day old baby boy tonight for my wifes friends. Been getting badgered about RAW lately, so I though being Easter, I might give it a crack. Just got home. Throw one into Lightroom, spent 10 minutes flicking this and that. Gave up. Loaded it in CS2, above adjustments. Bingo. Looks nice enough for me to print.

Is RAW for pixel peepers? Do I need to sit down and learn (god forbid)Lightroom?

And yes, I am a lazy bastard who is very anti PP.

here, here!! interested to see responses...

Oz_Beachside wrote:here, here!!

Where, where?

But seriously norbs, if you're getting what you want the way you shoot now, you'll gain nothing from using raw. If you can nail exposure and WB every time, and are happy with the in-cam jpg conversion, then no real advantage.

Using raw retains all the data acquired by the sensor at the time of capture, whch can help for later post processing.

Cheers

What Digitor said, but bear in mind that if it's a critical shoot, and you screw up (or find things screwed up on your behalf) shooting in raw gives you a whole host of extra options from which to pull an image.

Like you, I don't like to do too much PP. To me that means I need to get it right in the camera.

But when I don't - and I mean "when" - I do have options. If I'm shooting in jpg, I may be in deep shit.

If, and I do mean if, you screw up then you have more of a chance of getting a result from RAW. Why not shoot RAW+JPEG

Gary has summarised nicely how the majority would look at this question. Myself included.

RAW is a safety net for me.

sirhc55 wrote:If, and I do mean if, you screw up then you have more of a chance of getting a result from RAW. Why not shoot RAW+JPEG

I did that tonight. But I was surprised how quickly my 2 gig card filled up.

There are times when you are in a hurry and change things quickly around, and messed up some shots, and RAW are ones which you can actually recover from bigger errors.

If you have all the time you need and make adjustments to what you need, then its no need for RAW, simple JPEG can do them. Tho this does not apply to every photographic situation, so shooting RAW is just to be on the safe side, an insurance you get yourself.

Apart from that, some camera's JPEG convertion algorithm is better and some does not do that good job, and prefer to convert them back on a proper RAW converter.

In summary, RAW allows a bigger tolerance of error while JPEG are quite restricted to spot on exposure/WB/camera settings.

norbs wrote:

sirhc55 wrote:If, and I do mean if, you screw up then you have more of a chance of getting a result from RAW. Why not shoot RAW+JPEG

I did that tonight. But I was surprised how quickly my 2 gig card filled up.

i found this yesterday
I only shoot jpeg + RAW because otherwise i cant see thumbnails in folders while using windows to browse the previews

norbs wrote:

sirhc55 wrote:If, and I do mean if, you screw up then you have more of a chance of getting a result from RAW. Why not shoot RAW+JPEG

I did that tonight. But I was surprised how quickly my 2 gig card filled up.

Get another one.

If you store your raw file in archives. In 10 years from now we may get, we will get better post processing applications. You never know, you might be interested to do something with your images captured in the past. You may decide you want to give the images captured in RAW to PROs for PP etc. jpeg will be of limited use in PP.

Also, some people play with HDRi. You would need images in raw for that.

For me, the critical issue is white balance control.

Yesterday at Easter lunch, Kris & I were taking photos of her younger cousins playing in the living room. Lighting was a difficult mix of tungsten downlights & very overcast daylight through the windows. Every single shot required a different white balance to account for the mixed lighting; children would run close to the window, and be lit by cool daylight (~6000 kelvin), and then inside the house were under very warm (~3000 kelvin) tungsten lights.

Even using grey cards and WB presets, there was no way to account for the mixed lighting here. RAW was the only viable option IMO

And this example doesn't even take into account creative uses of WB: try 'cooking' a late afternoon shot by adding ~500k to the colour temp, and you'll appreciate the possibilities offered by shooting RAW.

norbs wrote:I did that tonight. But I was surprised how quickly my 2 gig card filled up.

With CF cards being as cheap as they are, this is just an observation, but simply not a valid response.

I used to shoot RAW all the time when i was learning, as it gave me greater scope to fix my mistakes. As my shots and techniques improved I stoped using raw functions and reverted back to shooting only jpegs (in the majority of situations). I still shoot raw when i am photographing something with tricky light, etc, as it lets me blend exposures and adjust WB in photoshop later on.

Cross posted on OCAU, I didnt respond thier but I think I might here.

RAW is a digital negative. It is a capture of exactly what the sensor saw when you pressed the shutter. All the original detail is their highlights have not been clipped, shadow have not been compressed to all black (shades of grey detail remain). Their is between 12 and 16bits of data in your RAW file per pixel (depending on camera) compared with 8 bits per pixel in JPG (a standard file format).

If you are shooting in tricky lighting conditions, landscapes, rapidly chaging lighting conditions etc your best bet is RAW. You can push and pull it further exposure wise recovering more details. You can blend exposure's from the same shot. You get less noise.

I think at the end of the day it's an archival quality record of your photo, something you can process again later in a million different ways. So long as it's backed up and stored properly it will last longer than a film negative an be around for your life time.

i shoot in raw because i still don't trust the compression settings on any camera and saving a jpeg to a jpeg has it's other world of issues as has been shown by a few members on this forum. Shooting in Raw for me provides me with the highest quality image to start with so I won't have any regrets later on.

The card space limitation is a non-issue. If it was 3 years ago, then maybe it might have been legitimate argument.

norbs wrote:Gday all,

Once I get home, I have a quick flick through them in iView, grab a couple of goodens, give them a 30 second touch up in PS (usually +5 contrast and 20% USM), then upload them to Flickr. Now, even that amount of PS is too much imho.

I don't see what the problem is here.
I shoot raw and if I wanted to I could do exactly the same thing as you in the same amount of time. Just open the image in rawshooter (a free program), adjust contrast, sharpness and save as jpeg and because rawshooter loads up much faster then CS2 I reckon I would be finished before you.

I still flick my camera over to JPEG for sports or more happy snappy type people shots when the conditions are right - the 1D2 produces vibrant saturated images which I'm really happy with.

Apart from that though, you know the stuff I like to do norbs and the latitude offered by RAW in processing is critical for getting the shots I like.

It's not how you shoot that is important. It's what you get.

Matt. K wrote:It's not how you shoot that is important. It's what you get.

Matt, are you sitting next to a box of fortune cookies?



(I completely agree, but it sounded very 'zen')

MY D200 doesn't have a jpeg setting... well if it does I haven't found it yet

firsty wrote:MY D200 doesn't have a jpeg setting... well if it does I haven't found it yet

you need to read the book that came with the camera.........

big pix wrote:

firsty wrote:MY D200 doesn't have a jpeg setting... well if it does I haven't found it yet

you need to read the book that came with the camera.........

Book....What book hehehe, o u mean that thing that flashes past as u rip open the box.....