birdpix Loc: South East Pennsylvania

Mogul, I'm sorry you took it that way. My point was to say that if you are going to "Throw down the Gauntlet" and make statements indicating that people who shoot RAW don't know what they are doing then you had better prove to me that you do. Show me with your own photographs how you can do it all with JPEG. If you are unwilling to show your work then my suspicion is that you are a fraud and your only goal was to foment an argument.

Newbies have nothing to fear from me. You will always get my support and assistance in areas that I know well...and can show you proof that I know what I am talking about.

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

Long ago, when I shot a lot of 4 X 5, I kept a carefully indexed box of my negatives. Several years ago, I digitized all of my proof prints and saved them as TIFFs. That box of negatives is now in storage, and I doubt that I will ever use it (even if I can find it).

My point? I shoot everything in raw. When I transfer images to my computer, I process three images: a RAW, a TIFF and a JPEG (hereinafter referred to as R, T and J. I use the J to transfer any images to my iPad or send via email. The T's are used if I want to do any post processing (not many worth working on); processed pictures are also saved as T's and converted to J's for reasons stated above. But the R's? Ah yes, they are the same as my indexed large format negatives. They are the ones saved to a separate drive and stored offsite. They are the ones from which I can reconstruct any T or J. They are the images with all the information my camera can gather. If you are so good that your first effort, your in-camera composition and exposure, are perfect, then maybe I envy you. But I'm not that good. I've worked on images for hours before realizing how bad they were getting. I've had to go back and toss lousy T's and J's, but I always have that R to start over. And by doing so, I've been lucky enough to extract a few finished products that I was not totally ashamed to donate for charity auctions (the pictures within pictures). So I keep the R's because I'm not a great photographer; some keep them because they are great photographers. If you only take and keep J's, you're either a bad photographer, a mediocre photographer, a good photographer or a great photographer. In the end, nobody is going to change your mind. You shoot R or you shoot J. If you're not having fun doing it, you have the wrong hobby or profession!

gemac Loc: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Just a few irrelevant comments. Audio has wav and mp3. one takes a horrendous amount of space. I find that after about 13 years of collecting images digitally ranging from early .3 megapixel to some over 100 megapixel (yes, panoramas) that the majority are jpegs. I started collecting raw with the D90 and in retrospect I would cheerfully throw away about 95% of them because they are record shots and not something I want to spend hours with. Sure that beautiful landscape or human subject has more detail in raw than in jpeg but the subject is continuous, moving, 3 dimension, rotatable (you can walk around and see different viewpoints). you cant take it all in. A photo at best is a slice in time which is why there is such a thing as frames per second. So if you cant really take it all in I still marvel at amazing jpegs, hate the large storage of raw files. Organizing and finding images in a "galaxy" of 50,000 or so ... it is better to be able to find it at all than to build larger and larger terabyte haystacks. Fuji's film analogs, the d90's wedding photo mild unsharpness are camera items and not necessarily a great thing to PP about. Cloning, healing and lots of other PP activity work on jpegs and if you want you can convert them to TIFFS if you are going to open and save multiple times

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

Actually, I don't see irrelevancy in you comments. You bring up a good point. I should have added, in my last post, that at this moment, I have very few images stored anywhere except in iPhoto. The raw images are stored on one offsite drive. The tif and jpg images are purged so that only the best (all four of them) remain on the HDD; the rest are on DVD's for a year or so, then discarded. That is the only way I can continue to use my old 160gb drive, which is only 60% full. I've had this computer (a MacBook Pro) for several years. That old HDD is living on borrowed time. So my computer is not full of old unwanted images. All the rest of my data, including iPhoto of course, is backed up to my RAID. I strongly believe in the old adage, "It isn't a question of IF your hard drive will crash, it's a question of WHEN!"

Larrie Loc: NE Ohio

They only shrink from Border Collies

nolte1964 Loc: Des Moines, Iowa

Got to love how a simple thread that really was baseless and a waste of time manages to start a squabble maybe that was the point of this thread.....

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

This is your third post on this thread. Do you have anything positive to contribute or are you just here to make snide remarks?

Bmac Loc: Long Island, NY

Snide, but true. :mrgreen:

nolte1964 Loc: Des Moines, Iowa

I will try to contain my comments to being relevant to the topic at hand in the future.

mdorn Loc: Portland, OR

We are almost to 12 pages... not sure there is much "future" left in this thread... However, next week there will be another JPEG vs. raw post. I just keep cutting and pasting my views. Eventually, I'll get bored of this cheap entertainment and ignore further posts. :-)

Since this is a JPEG only thread, I just want to say that I love JPEG! Despite what people use for their workflow, JPEG is a great format that is not going anywhere anytime soon. Just like streaming video and AAC/MP3s, the convenience and portability is hard to beat. I suspect there are a few purists that only listen to WAV music and view only Blu-ray movies. I guess as I get older and my eyesight and hearing wane, having all the bits to see and listen to isn't that important anymore. :-)

jazzplayer

Mark - Although it's obvious that no more really need be said here ;), I wanted to mention that I find your analogy to music file formats most apt indeed.
And in the same way as MP3s are "good enough" for probably about 95% of music listeners (myself included), JPGs are also good enough for most image usage and applications. Still, in the same way that serious music producers would almost never master a music CD from MP3s, so also would a serious publisher not print their coffee table photo books or periodicals from JPGs. Both are compressed and "lossy" formats, and there is just not enough fine control over the finished product to assure "professional grade" final results. Works dandy for those interweb postings, tho.... ;-)

mdorn Loc: Portland, OR

Great points... but we've already established that most (if not all) DSLRs shoot in raw already. This issue is more about "would you let some lab geek decide how the data gets processed in camera, or would you like to post process it yourself?" Obviously, many are not big fans of letting the camera firmware post process the raw data. Personally, I think my camera does a pretty good job at it---sometimes better than I can do in Photoshop. Of course, I'm not a Photoshop expert, so perhaps if I had a lot more skill in this area, I'd feel differently.

Regarding the compressed music issue... I used to be furious with Apple and their iTunes store---selling compressed music at a dollar a song when I can get the uncompressed songs for slightly more than this. What a scam, and people (mostly young people) thought iTunes was such a great deal. Of course, as an old guy, I had an expensive Hi-Fi stereo system that cost me thousands... I wasn't about to put a compressed song on it. Then I got older and couldn't fight or slow down the technology paradigm shift we are going through right now with the digital age. Convenience over quality. But I digress...

You are absolutely right. Music producers would not work with less, and neither should photographers. Again, the difference is that I think the camera does a pretty good job, and then I finish it off with small simple adjustments like cropping, contrast and saturation. For MY purposes, this just works (gosh, I sound like an Apple user now...). I would also put up some of my JPEG work against any photographer who chooses to post process from raw. However, in the end it doesn't really matter, does it? If you and I entered our photos in a contest, they would be evaluated based on the criteria given. The last contest I entered did not check to see if I post processed my work from raw.

Thanks for responding to my comments. BTW: I shoot in JPEG + raw, but discard 90% of the raw data after review, so I appreciate having ALL the data if I deem it's needed. Yes, 10% of the time, I do PP from raw. Yet, I still love JPEG. :-)

gemac Loc: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

If you look at some people who try to shut a topic down that really strikes interest with the theory that they already know the answer then they loose. Giant stereo systems went to garage sales with the advent of ipods. More jpegs are used everyday on facebook in quite low resolution than the output of raw by lots of professionals not to mention the flow of jpegs from amateur cameras and phones and tablets. My daughter had a personalized calendar printed and her "wedding photo album" is going to be a hardcover do it yourself storybook of you guessed it.. jpegs. Photography is really changing because of facebook and the web. More people look at "still pictures" in relatively low resolution and spend lots of time there on the web. So instead of nattering about raw is beautiful and jpeg is ugly remember that the raw file with all its detail is like the negative and prints with their murky blacks and dull whites are the jpeg of yesteryear ... only photographers enjoyed the negatives, people all looked at prints (with color slides being a middle ground). Be aware that todays trends are pointing to a future.

Pepper Loc: Planet Earth Country USA

I think too that we overlook the fact that the vast majority of folks here on UHH are much more into what the photo “is” instead of what the photo “says”. Most folks on facebook couldn’t care less about the technical aspects of the photos they post, most are only using the photo to tell a story or make a statement. It’s really not about the photo itself. In general a jpeg is all that’s necessary for most social media posts because it’s a very small percentage that even consider the quality of the photos they post.

FilmFanatic Loc: Waikato, New Zealand

This argument about itunes files being inferior is hogwash sorry. AAC is transparent above 192k (iTunes plus is 256k VBR) and I will challenge anyone to pick the difference between 256k and the CD, in a controlled test, and by that I mean an ABX test, and the files need to be from the same master so that means taking a CD, ripping a track lossless, making an itunes plus version of that same file and then running the two files through an ABX test program with the volume levels precisely matched. Do this for four or five different music styles and come back to me with the logs.