Hi John,
Not trying to sound overly critical but it appears to me you've conducted
an experiment where you had a foregone conclusion and you proved it.
Of the two photos below the flower in the 'jpeg' appears to be the
correct color and just about correct exposure. It is a bit bright, so I
supsect you metered on some larger part of the area than just the flower.
You should get the proper metering if you spot meter on the flower or if
your camera is a bit 'hot' simply adjust the exposre by -1/3 EV. This
issue is independent of the jpeg vs raw debate.
The other thing it appears you adjusted is the color cast. It seems in
the raw version you added a purple/blue color cast. Is this more like
the original flower? If so you could bracket your white-balance,
although I have a hard time imagining your camera got it wrong in this
senario. Your camera could run a bit to the orange side so you could
adjust for 1-2 additional levels of blue if you find you need to make
this adjustment in PS every time. Otherwise if this is an astethic
choice it has no provative merit in the jpeg vs raw discussion either.
Raw does have genuine advantages in the adjustment space, but in these
photos it was probably not needed. I think sometimes people are now
getting into 'adjustment for adjustment' sake. This is less about
photography and more about artistic vision and computer supported
photomanipulation.
To me the key advantage of raw is one that most people fail to notice.
Raw gives you a very slight increase in recorded dynamic range. This
could be crtical if the histogram in your photo spans the edges of your
sensor's range. You could determine this ahead of time by spot metering
the brightest object in the photo and spot metering the darkest area of
the photo. If the differeince is more than 8-10 stops I'd absolutely
shoot in raw every time. Btw even in raw if the DR is much higher than
this you probably will lose detail.
On the other hand, jpeg has some key unsung advantages. For some reason
I hear this 'rule of thumb' that photogs have about 'editing' and losing
information all the time now. Let me be the first to point out that
losing information can be a good thing. The whole benefit and success
of jpeg and reason it is a widely used standard is that it "loses
information." In this case it mostly loses information that 'blind'
formats would thoughtlessly store. This is an advantage. Its the same
reason why mp3 has revolutionized music listening.
Perceptually, editing your jpegs does not lose significant information if
you keep the quality setting high. You can edit your jpegs dozens of
times, always working from the edit (who does this?) and not damage your
work of art. In fact, if you are editing your photo 10-20 times always
working from an editited intermediate saved as a jpeg, I'm guessing your
doing so much photomanipulation that the original photo is next to
irrelevant at that point. But this is a substantially uncommon
workflow. Do you always drive on the left just in case your city is
overrun by the English? You may be missing out on important benefits of
the right lane.
Every time you click the shutter your camera ccd throws away enourmous
dynammic range that the human eye easily notices. Does this make the
ccd lossy and useless? I highly doubt it.
I shoot 90% JPEG and RAW when I need a boost in dynamic range or edit-
flexability.
Btw, the photos you attached are both jpegs.
John
John - Pa. wrote in :
My fancy new camera has 2 media slots, one for a CF card and one for a
SD card. Among other options, it also has the ability to record the
same sensor capture to both media with different settings. Although I
have shot RAW almost exclusively for years, I wanted to compare RAW
and JPG on the new camera. To do this I shot a bunch of stuff today
recording a "standard" style JPG to one media, and simultaneous RAW to
the other. These are not separate shutter activations; they are
literally the same exposure recorded to different places.
Now, I suppose that this isn't "fair" because I did process the Raw
image in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, while the JPG was just resized
from the file that came out of the camera. On the other hand, the real
question is, do I want to save time and storage and rely on the
off-the-camera processing of the JPG "picture style", or continue to
do my own processing with RAW. While I suppose that I could have
fooled around with the JPG in PS too, I figure that there isn't much
point to that since the manipulation of a RAW-based file carrying
14-bits of data per channel (in my case) should produce better results
than manipulating an 8-bit/channel file with lossy compression that
will degrade with every "save". The question to be answered is; will
the difference in quality be worth the file-size and time of RAW
processing, or should I just shoot JPG and not worry about it.
In case anyone wonders, this is an Oenothera speciosa (showy
primrose).
JD
Canon 1D-mkIII
EXIF Data Included
e-mail: blissful-wind(at)usa.net
Additional images at;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/john-pa/
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