RAW vs jpeg - no difference for a pro?

Joined: 14 Feb 2006 Posts: 4

One pro says this:

"I think many would be interested in knowing how many pros, that make their livings 100% from photography, find that jpegs are more than enough for their work."

I thought most "pros" should RAW exclusively. What's your take?

Premium Member Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 5758

It just depends on how much editing you do. If you shoot jpegs you should feel perfectly comfortable tweaking the levels, cloning out a pimple, sharpening, etc. If you know what you're doing you can even make fairly decent white balance adjustments to jpegs too. If you're concerned about lossiness in jpeg format you can always save it as a tiff or psd instead.

RAW is meant for big edits. Completely customized white balance, optimized dynamic range, significant changes in exposure and contrast processing. You have much more room to edit without image degradation. You can also make a critical resizing step in RAW, and you can open your image in huge color spaces like ProPhoto RGB.

But does that matter to you? It's a personal decision. I happen to take far fewer photos than a professional photographer, so I don't have to edit 2000 photos a week. If you have very high volume and you know what you're doing in the camera then it might not make sense to shoot RAW.

Remember that RAW doesn't have anything to do with image quality in an unedited picture. And you'd be very hard pressed to edit an image straight in RAW and then alternatively straight from 8-bit and show us a meaningful difference.

Joined: 05 Jun 2006 Posts: 245 Location: Northern MA

RAW just provides a greater level of control with your image on your memory card. When you bring it into your computer, it has virtualy all the settings you had on your camera, and you can tweak what you need.

JPG doesn't quite store as many pixels, and remember that every time you save it, you lose a bit of detail - hence people refer to JPG as a 'lossy' file format. If you shoot exclusively JPG, it is a good practice to shoot at the highest resolution your camera allows, then when you import from your card to your computer, save in a lossless format, such as TIF (add an F for Macs ;) ). You pretty much have to save RAW files as something else, if you plan on sharing them with others.

RAW provides you with the flexibility to use the capabilities of your 'digital darkroom' and JPG lets the camera do the work for you. Do you trust how smart your camera happens to be? :)

Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 8:47 am

Personally I think that if you do a good job with your exposure and white balance, raw is often unnecessary. With a 12+ mp camera or a digital back or whatever, raw files can be too large to work with quickly on a laptop. Speed becomes the issue, and actually, pros are less likely to have all day to fiddle with their files, so they may well prefer to pass jpegs on to the editor. Nonprofessionals have alld ay and can do whatever they want. I'm not so sure it's a good thing, to rely on exposure compensation and WB correction as a crutch. Well, to each his/her own!

I think that with the really high end (20mp+) digitals, raw is very seldom used.

Some time back, I chatted with a sports shooter at a lacrosse game, he said he shot maybe 300 captures per game, and never worked with raw because it was pointless and unworkable. As I recall he had a 1ds MkII or maybe the faster one. Now, if I worked one of those sports gigs, I would absolutely not pass a raw file on to an editor, that would be ceding too much authority! Better to see the shot on the laptop approximately as it will print, and then release it to editor in that form. I might possibly save the file in raw format, but I probably would not pass it on to the next guy.

:) keithwms[/u]

Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:31 am

Yes, I use RAW format myself, but only because I do a lot of crazy editing to get my images looking "different than the norm". Since the images are also being editing by multiple people here, it's essential to maintain the quality, regardless of how many saves are done. If we were using JPG, I couldn't imagine how we would be able to resize for larger prints with all of the artifacting taking place.

It does give us the flexibility to vastly change the "look" of an image, and I don't know what we'd do without it. It's a good format for very large prints and heavy editing, otherwise minor touchups would work great with JPG.

Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:47 am

Ok, so I'm one of these amateurs that have got all day to fiddle around with his shots, so I shoot RAW. The extra leniancy it provides in exposure compensation and WB adjustment makes it worth MY while.

I'm good friends with 2 or 3 full time professional photographers, all of whom are in different areas. One is a photojournalist for a national daily newspaper, one is a commercial photographer that does advertising commisions etc and one a normal every day wedding photographer.

The photojournalist NEVER shoots RAW as he doesnt have time for the additional steps RAW adds into your work flow. The other two shoot exclusively RAW, but I was surprised to hear the reasons why - it's not for the additional bit depth/processing option, but actually as a digital negative! They feel that the RAW is a good format for keeping as proof of copyright if ever any issues arise. They convert very quickly to JPG/TIFF and use these for editing and the RAW's are kept as proof.

Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 12:37 pm

Yeah, I agree with you... it's an excellent way to archive, especially if your style changes later down the road and you want to develop the photo a different way. Definately, to each their own. That's exactly what we do though, use them for archiving. We do all of our editing in TIF then finalize in JPG, to save space on our in-house server.

Joined: 22 Jul 2006 Posts: 79 Location: USA-NY

I see no downside to RAW except that it uses more space. If we were trying to save space, we would all buy the smallest camera with the least amount of pixels. Use it if you got it.