Comments on: tech: RAW vs. JPEG – the real story

By: SimonD

SimonD — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:47:03 +0000

Just stumbled on this site and read a few articles, and watched a few vids, I love the way you explain things very much in my terms and don’t sound too technical.

I rarely use RAW as I can shoot over 1,000 shots a day and it seems too much hassle to work with RAW and the extra time to process but this has got me rethinking!
(I always shoot back to back RAW & Jpeg in case but usually just store the RAW untouched)

Thanks for the very useable info.
SimonD

By: hector m.

hector m. — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:24:35 +0000

bookmarked your website.

thanx

By: hector m.

hector m. — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:24:07 +0000

great post.

learned alot.

By: Doug Chinn

Doug Chinn — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:06:52 +0000

Hi There, Jim

as always, very informative, but I must echo Danny’s thoughts on clickability as I have pretty poor, for a photog, eyesight. Plus….plus, I’m in the middle of one of those RAW v Jpg sort of discussions. You know, them as get a tad heated at times! Not to be had in a bar! Anyway, you certainly did give something to consider, small piccies or no. I’m already looking forward to tomorrow’s post. Thanks, too, for noting what you did to acheive a particular result. I know it must be old hat to you pro guys, but it took me almost three months to figure CS2 out so that I could load a picture to work on without messing it up totally. There was the famous incident when I submitted a shot for a competition without really knowing what I was up to. I got all the size settings haywire, and ended up sending my submission at 27FEET long! I didn’t win.

Catch up with you later,

Doug.

By: Jim Talkington

Jim Talkington — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:49:06 +0000

I understand what a help it would be to have the images bigger and definitely want to make it happen. It’s pretty involved to make it work from inside the site but posting them to an external source, like flickr, should work great. I’ll try to do that tonight and will give notice in tomorrow’s post, in case anyone wants to backtrack and review them. Thanks, Danny! Comments help make the site better…

By: Danny

Danny — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:34:17 +0000

Nice article, but I wish the examples had been clickable, to see them bigger. Can’t tell to much the way they are shown.
Keep up the good work!

By: NormMonkey

NormMonkey — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:18:06 +0000

There are lots of (sometimes heated) debates about RAW vs. JPG, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone put some action behind their argument and demonstrate it with pictures. Nicely done!

On my camera the RAW files come out a little bit softer than the JPGs rather than sharper. Why? Because the camera’s image processing also sharpens. However, there is still lots more *detail* in the RAW file.

Besides, I’d rather decide for myself how I’d like to sharpen it. No offense to my camera, but my PC has more processing power and better algorithms at hand.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:50:34 +0000

Great post that nicely lays out only some of the benefits of shooting RAW. And you didn’t even mention that some cameras are allowing you to process 14-bit RAW files now, allowing for even smoother gradients and more information!

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:14:39 +0000

Really great post Jim. I shoot RAW, and understand the benefits, but I’ve never seen such side-by-side comparisons of post processing of JPG and RAW. Well done!