| RAW or JPEG | |
In the old days there was a choice between shooting slides or prints. If you were shooting colour and you were reasonably serious about it, you would choose slides. One of the main reasons for this choice was control. Unless the lab fouled up, what you wanted to be recorded on film was what came out. You were responsible for the exposure and any filters that were used – and any mistakes! Slides had their downsides and were not the answer all the time. Try handing a box of slides around in the pub for your mates to admire and look at all the puzzled expressions. In a sound recording studio the technicians will do their best to record every instrument separately and will even use several microphones to record a drum kit faithfully. They will then mix the tracks down to produce the final stereo effect. They could of course get the band to play the track live in the studio and just use two mikes to make the stereo recording straight away - but they don’t. Again the main reason is control. If one musician hits a bum note they can get that track recorded again. With the live in the studio version they would have to live with it or record the whole thing again. It is the same thing with the RAW v JPEG argument. RAW allows the photographer to have more control. Any JPEG already has sharpening, colour space, saturation, white balance, noise reduction, and so on applied to the image. When the shutter is pressed these values are determined. With RAW these values are selected by the photographer when the picture is opened in the RAW conversion software and can be changed to suit a particular exposure or set of exposures. Setting each of these values loses some information from the image file therefore setting all these values in camera means that the JPEG file has far less information than a RAW file would. Because the RAW image contains more information it can withstand a far greater amount of manipulation before it shows ill effects such as posterisation. Recently I shot a series of pictures of people inside a conservatory, lit by daylight. I set the white balance on the camera to ‘daylight’ but the resulting images had a colour cast due to the decoration in the room. Using RAW this was quick and easy to fix. I could alter it on one image and then apply this new white balance to all the other images automatically. If I had shot JPEG it would have taken a long time to remove the colour cast from all these images. The vast majority of my images are now made using RAW. Processing RAW files does not take long if you make use of the automation features of Photoshop. There are of course times when JPEG is a better choice especially of images that are not so important. For instance all the pictures that I use to advertise items for sale on ebay are shot as JPEG’s. |
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