A contrarian view.....

[hobbydog]

A lot lot has been said about RAW vs. jpeg and I wanted to make a few comments. First of all, I do not want to debate the merits of the two as it is obvious that RAW is better than jpeg. The questions are how much better and when is RAW appropriate . I would also like to give a few of my humble opinions to those getting started.

First of all it has been stated or at least implied that you would be foolish to shoot jpeg over raw for wildlife photography. For beginners or even intermediates and amateurs I think this is really bad advice. There is so much more to taking good pictures than just the technical back end post processing mumbo jumbo. It is easy to intimidate a beginner with pixels and DPI and USM, DOF, whitebalance and on and on. If you are still in the learning curve you need to shoot a lot of pics so that you learn how to use shutter speed and aperture to get depth of field and stop action, learn proper composition, and learn minor post processing such as adjusting for saturation, sharpness, contrast and brightness.....just to name a few and not to mention all the bells and whistles that come with even the entry level DSLRs. The ability to take a lot of pics and quickly review and learn is what makes DSLR so appealing and easy to learn. There is a lot to master though and to do this you need to shoot a lot of pics, view them and critique them. Shooting RAW is a slow cumbersome process....your cards fill up fast, you need lots of computer RAM and CPU, calibrated monitors, and TIME....lots of it. You will miss the forest through all the trees. You will be deleting images to make room on your card when Bigfoot makes a brief 2 second appearance.....

Once you have master all of the above then maybe you are ready to shoot RAW when the occasion is right. You have great subject matter, you have time, and you are after that once in every so often shot when you know the conditions are right. But capturing a great pic in a RAW format is one thing....... doing something with it is another story. That takes as much time and and learning as mastering the art of taking the good pic in the first place. Then if you are a left brained person like myself, you can know how to do all the manipulation but artistic ability to interpret the output will never be as great as the RAW format can deliver.

Then there is the fact that jpeg out of the camera is not compressed in the way many on here believe. Compressed implies that something is lost. Out of the camera, nothing is lost. (it may not contain shooting data but the picture pix are represented without loss.) It can be manipulated in PP and be saved in a lossless jpeg format. (one should never save over the original, always "save as" so you maintain the original or "digital negative"). How can something be compressed and have no loss? Good question. If you have 20 pixels in a row that are exactly the same you don't need to represent each on with an 8 bit value, You say "the next 20 pixels have a value of xxx....this can be done with two 8 bit bytes vs. twenty. This is very similar to a zip file, when you zip something and send it, nothing is lost when you unzip it. Where loss comes in is when you say ..."the next 20 bits are not the same but within an xx number of pixels of being the same" .....The more tolerance in xx the more real compression and smaller file size. You will lose pixels when you save this way when you PP. Bottom line.....you can take very good pics (and make prints)with jpeg!

Last but not least.....99+ percent photogs with good equipment will never get pics published or sold at any consistent level. Steve has alluded to this several time. It is a tough market to break into and you have to be great, hard working and lucky to do so. One may get into a few calendars, news papers, or magazines and maybe even make a few bucks on the side. You may print some great enlargements for family and friends, and for that, the effort to shoot RAW is a worthy goal. But understand what it takes to get there. Practice, time, lots of pics and honest critique (be your own worst critic). Most important, have fun and it will show in your pics whether they are raw or jpeg.

[buzzsaw]

Bravo, well said Bill!!

[Steve Foss]

Thanks for the perspective, hobbydog. It's a valuable one. And I agree that, for the beginner and many beyond beginners, jpeg is the better format to use. And there are many pros, especially those who sell primarily to magazines, who use jpeg almost all the time for its convenience and because those really big enlargements are not needed.

[Dbl]

Quote:

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I shoot JPEG for all my sports shooting just for the shear volume of PP involved with 300-500 shots per day. When it comes to outdoor or wildlife shots RAW is the choice of most.

Short but non-technical reasons why you may be better shooting RAW;

1. RAW captures the data from your sensor with greater tonal and color information (we can get technical, but won't). You will be able to extract details from both lights and darks in your photo that JPEG won't even record. You have a greater flexibility in changing colors and tones through software, not through the limitations of your camera.

2. You have many more details available in your RAW image, ability to print larger sizes. Not an issue if you just post to the web.

3. White Balance and exposure errors are much easier to correct in RAW than the errors the camera (IE the photographer) uses.

4. Degradation of JPEG, re-compression loss when editing and re-saving JPEG images which includes cropping and rotating.

I shot JPEG for the first year I had my camera. When I started experimenting with RAW the results were nothing short of outstanding. I think it depends on how much quality you "need" to squeeze out of your photos, how many will make it to your walls or be published? Also, how much time and effort you have to convert each picture you take? How good is good enough? Comfort level with computers, software and editing process. In the end do what makes you comfortable.

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I agree with most of your comments hobby, so lets review a few facts about JPEG as we did with RAW.

1. Saving an image to JPEG format, always introduces some loss in quality. Loss is introduced when the image is closed, re-opened, edited and saved again. So edit all you want, just try to do all of your final editing in one save session. Always keep a master copy of any image you expect to edit again in the future.

2. One of the drawbacks to compression is that there is a slight change in color, or shifting of color even in high quality JPEG, so if accurate color matching is important you may want to consider another format.

3. Copying and renaming a JPEG will not introduce any loss, but some image editors do re compress JPEGs when the "Save As" command is used.

4. When saving JPEGs from your digital camera, you should use your camera's higher quality setting, not resolution (which effects pixel dimensions), to reduce the damage done by JPEG compression. So if you want to save space shoot 4mp, or a smaller resolution of mega pixels, just shoot at the highest quality.

As mentioned above I still shoot roughly 90% JPEG, when I go to specifically shoot a blackbird, geese, ducks, etc then I shoot RAW. There really is no larger learning curve with editing RAW as opposed to editing JPEG, the same principles apply. It all takes time if you are striving for the best possible outcome.

Calibrated monitors has been mentioned in previous posts and here again. How do you know what you are seeing on your screen is actually what you shot? I have heard many comments in various posts about saturation, color, etc but all of that must be taken with a grain of salt unless you have a monitor that is accurate. If you are taking the plunge into the digital world it IMHO just another expense to get what you want out of a photo.

I spent less than $100 on my calibration setup and it is as simple as turning on your computer. If you have a CRT you can adjust your gamma for free, do a google search and you will come up with multiple sites. If you have an LCD, your options are limited.

These discussions serve a purpose for information gathering. Ultimately each person will decide what works for them in each situation. For many that will probably be JPEG, for others with different requirements that may be RAW. Use both or one or the other, or......my point is just take pictures in whatever format you choose and post them here so we all can enjoy them.