DirtFarmer wrote:
If jpg fine works for you, then by all means use it. I would say that if you take test shots (one raw, one jpg) you have to be careful how you compare them. When you shoot jpg, the image you get is determined by your camera settings. When you shoot raw, the image you get is determined by your postprocessing settings. It's really hard to synchronize the two so you can do a proper comparison. It may not even be possible because the software that determines the camera jpg was written by the camera manufacturer and the software that determines the postprocessed jpg was written by someone else. (While camera manufacturers do provide software to work with their images, software is not their primary endeavor and I believe that other people do software better).
Even if you did manage to get a very similar jpg out of the postprocessing software, I believe you would not see much difference in maybe 90% of your shots. It's that extra 10% where the difference lies, and that 10% might just be the important shots.
Personally, raw works better for me for several reasons.
I started shooting jpg because that's what I knew. Didn't know anything about raw. I continued, fat and happy, for maybe a year. Then one day I changed the white balance setting on my camera and forgot to change it back. I took some important shots. They all came out with a blue cast. It took me a very long time fiddling with my editing program to recover something useful from the jpgs, and they never really looked as good as I thought they should have. After that day I started shooting raw+jpg. I had the familiar jpg and a raw file to use if I screwed up again. Eventually I learned how to use the raw file and that became my primary choice.
At first I tried 3 or 4 different editing programs. I settled on Lightroom, not least because of the digital asset management aspect of the program. The basic editor was (to me, anyway) pretty intuitive and I found it easy to use. And once I got into the habit of adding keywords to every image I was able to find photos from several years ago that I had forgotten that I took. Once I started using Lightroom in that way I found that having the keywords available for searching was really important to me. So I wanted to put all my images into Lightroom. Once I made that decision I dropped the jpg from the raw+jpg shooting because if I'm going to use lightroom anyway I might as well use the raw file because there's more information there to use in the edit.
I think I could probably get reasonably good jpgs from my camera. But there's no point in doing so since raw avoids the bad camera setting problem and I have to put the images into Lightroom anyway to add keywords. Lightroom makes it easy to add keywords at import time.
If jpg fine works for you, then by all means use i... (
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Dirt Farmer: You understand about this! Would you please, help me? I'm successfully importing images
onto my Ext HDD through my Laptop w/LR6 yet, things are going "a bit wrong. I don't EVER get the opportunity
to add any Keywords.
Everything that I import goes into a Sub-Folder on my Ext HDD; There's one, main one; called "Master Photography" and from here, there are Sub Folder's, one for each Memory Card that I import. These are automatically arranged by LR6 during Import by Yr/Mon/Date they were shot. (Which I like to have.)
My first import had 1,600 images and went OK except, that I never had a chance to add any Keywords to it.
However, when I imported my second memory card having 1,700 images, with newer dates, that had some overlap
in the years; I then saw on the LR6 Panel that showed my Ext HDD folder's, a long list of all the years, that contained very huge numbers of images in each of these year folders! (And I realized that these year folders were going to just
continue to grow extremely huge if I kept on doing what I'd been doing---that I was doing something wrong!?)
I became concerned, that if I continued to add my ten other memory cards, (let alone all that I keep shooting into the future), if I keep going on like this, that I'll have an immense, bloated number of images and system, in all of those ten "Year Folders" on my EXT HDD, and I'll never, be able to find anything!
I can, click on the "Drive-Folder Area", somewhere?, and have the images displayed, by the "original memory card", so that they appear as a group, together, I believe? (So perhaps, I could live like this? But I realize, that I'm not doing something the way, that is according to proper protocol, and am heading for a very big mess of some kind.
Do you think that you could set me straight? I'd sure appreciate it, before I go any further. Thanks. Rob.