Re: Raw vs jpeg

RAW Can Be Nonsense wrote:
On Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:50:21 -0400, Shawn Hirn <srhi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <lyndonr-202B92.13381319062009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lyndon <lyndonr@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am interested in buying a new dig camera. It will
be a modified camera that I intend to primarily only shoot
in monochrome mode and see little reason to ever shoot in color. However, the camera I most wanted does not do the RAW format. So, with intent to only shoot in monochrome, is there
any disadvantage in not having the raw format available?

Lyndon
This is very simple. If you intend to do a lot of photo manipulation in Photoshop or some other photo editor, shooting in raw is a good idea. If you do not intend to do much manipulation in a photo editor, raw is overkill.

Let us be reminded too where the popularity of RAW formats originated. In
the earlier years of DSLRs their in-camera RAW to JPG conversion process
was abominable. People spending that much on cameras couldn't tolerate the
color-balance, compression artifacts, and sharpening decisions that were
being made for them by the pencil-pushing tech-head firmware programmers,
those who knew absolutely nothing about real photography. Purchasers of

Your insults here should be hurled at the marketing men who insisted (correctly as it turns out) that sharpness sells to end users. Most cameras are by default slightly over sharpened in the firmware.

these cameras demanded access to the original sensor data so they could do
the conversion themselves, painstakingly trying to repair their camera's
glaring firmware programming problems and other imaging defects.

The maximum quality JPEG even out of early cameras like the Kodak DC-120 wasn't that far off the mark from a standards point of view. It did have a RAW mode though so that you could do a more complex demosaic and white balance afterwards. Despite only being a 1Mpixel camera it found a place for a while in scientific photography because of this feature.

There are still faults in the JPEG *decoders* that do lead to problems when shooting images that have fine black detail against saturated red or blues in them. Flowers and jazz or rock concerts for instance. In these circumstances RAW wins hands down because you do not get the JPEG subsampled chroma problems damaging the image resolution.

Many DSLRs still suffer from this poor conversion problem because owners of
them are more than happy to be jumping through needless editing hoops
trying to repair what their camera fails to provide in the first place. As
long as they are willing to do all this then the camera companies see no
need to make the conversion process better in the camera itself. Instead
they are quite content to also sell them overpriced and required RAW
editing software so the DSLR owner can repair all these defects on their
own. Just another way to make more money from fools. They primarily succeed
on the principle of, "There's one born every minute."

The current crop of JPEG converters in modern cameras have no difficulty in making near perfect high quality JPEGs that are the optimum encoding of their input data. There are no compromises on accuracy for speed now.

RAW gives you the option to sort out white balance and retain both deep shadow detail and highlights afterwards whereas the decision of the JPEG converter is pretty much final. The initial 12bit image has the dynamic range to support detail in both the brides dress and the grooms black velvet suit but not in a JPEG conversion unless you are very lucky.

Today's cameras designed to sell based on their JPG output alone do a
remarkable job of the in-camera conversion where little to no extra editing
is ever needed. You would be hard-pressed to champion what these cameras
provide in one step by processing the RAW data externally on your own. If

Pretty much agree unless you are shooting a scene with high dynamic range and details in the extremes that really matter to the content. Or in a challenging light environment that is outside what the autowhite balance can handle reliably - sports under HPS lights for instance.

you buy a good camera that handles this conversion process correctly in the
first place then access to a RAW file format is far far less important then
the lens affixed to that camera and other capabilities of that camera.

The continual increase in the number of pixels in the small cameras is getting pretty silly these days. Again marketting knows that a simple number sells on a mine is bigger than yours basis. But we have reached the point where more pixels doesn't mean more useful data.

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: RAW Converters
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  • Re: RAW Converters
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  • Re: Olympus E300 image quality
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