steinr98 wrote:
The above answers mostly answer your question! However, IF you are a serious photographer you will not shoot any B&W in a B&W mode PERIOD! The reason you ask, is because if you shoot in color, you will have more information in the Raw File of Color, than you would get shooting Raw in B&W. A known fact - and as a photographer, you always want the most complete file (most pixels)one can get!! The only true way is to shoot in color, and if you want B&W do it in post processing!!
The above answers mostly answer your question! Ho... (
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Oh really? Is that why whole, multi-billion dollar portrait companies make tens of millions of portraits every year, EXCLUSIVELY in JPEG mode? Is that why they spend millions of dollars on proprietary hardware, software, systems, and training, to educate their people in how to do it?
Sorry to get my dander up... This is not a reply rant to steinr98, but to all the brainwashed 'disciples of raw nazis' who helped him think that way.
Raw is for rookies! It is actually much more difficult to capture JPEGs correctly at the camera than it is to record raw files.
Why??? By way of analogy, it's almost exactly like working with transparency film (slides) was, before about the year 2000 and the advent of feasible digital capture. Great slides were HARD to create, because you had to control EVERYTHING at the camera. They had almost no latitude (+1/3, –1/2 stop). A processed slide "is what it is..." That's whatever you DID at the camera.
Like working with raw capture today, using Negative films was easy. Some negative films had +3, –2 FULL stops of latitude!
Working *properly* with JPEG capture requires you to read every page of your camera manual until you UNDERSTAND each and every menu selection there... to do a lot of scientific testing to find what works FOR YOU... to understand how to manipulate light to stay within the dynamic range of what you can actually print on paper... and more.
If you don't understand those things, or aren't willing to do so, well then, you can use raw, "point and shoot", and "fix it in post." You would be just like pros using color negative film in the 1960s through 2005. Their labs fixed everything for them. Now, of course, YOU are the lab, even if you USE a lab for prints!
Now before you get your panties in a twist, note that I would never advocate using JPEG for everything. Like anything else, it is JUST a tool. It is there for many very valid reasons, just as raw mode is there for times when you want and need the absolute maximum from your sensor. Outside of the portrait industry, many of us prefer to work in raw for certain types of subject matter, and default to JPEG for others. We consider BOTH sets of workflow to be important tools in the camera bag!
Factors in favor of JPEG are:
The time, bandwidth, storage, and processing power required for extremely high volume production
The need to minimize post-processing labor costs
The ability to control and lock down lighting for hundreds of images at a time
The need to meet deadlines for publication
The need for on-site printing of event photos, identification cards, passport photos, etc.
The need to work in burst mode for extended or fastest-possible action capture. (Fill up the buffer...)
The need to EXACTLY match video content captured on the same camera, to be used in a hybrid creation (stills plus video, with audio, graphics, music, text... deployed on the web).
Factors in favor of raw capture are:
The need to record very special events where lighting cannot be controlled or predicted sufficiently in advance
The need to capture the widest possible dynamic range available *without* supplementary lighting
The need to make the very best prints possible with available technology
The need to serve the very highest end of the market with very large prints
The need to satisfy demanding art directors
The need to compensate for lack of time, will, knowledge, and talent to achieve perfection at the camera (when, if you had all those, you might do so)
The need to record images with lots of latitude for post-processing, for whatever reasons
I would use JPEG capture for school portraits, institutional portraits, parts catalog item photography...
I would use raw capture for weddings, landscapes, fast sports or nature action in changing light, celebrity portraits...
Sorry, but whenever I see evidence of FROzen minded photographers, I have to rant.
Use the right tool for the job!