julian.gang wrote:
The problem is, if it really is one my camera only shoots in JPEG. But if I convert my JPEGs to TIFF do you even need to worry about RAW?...Julian
If you haven't got an option to shoot in Raw, then it's not something that can be applied to your work flow.
You have an 8 bit jpeg file. You don't have the color accuracy that is in a raw file.
It's best to keep the jpeg as uncompressed as possible.
If you think of it in terms of measurement then raw would be say centimeters and millimeters (10 millimeters per centimeter)
so if you were measuring say 40.7 cm (raw) jpeg would round to 41 cm and call it close enough.
A highly compressed jpeg might just call it 40cm for amy value between 38cm to 42cm when it comes to photos most of those approximate values are close enough to not detract from the image. Unless that is you have an area such as blue sky which would vary from a light blue to a darker blue.
In this case approximate colors doesn't cut it you can see the jump between shades of blue and this tends to be called banding or posterization.
either way its noticeable and ugly.
Thats one of the situations its nice to have a raw file.
The thing with tiff is you have 2 choices for resolution 8 bit or 16 bit (cm or cm +mm). If you are doing any kind of post-processing you will be altering pixel values (other than cropping which mostly make each pixel cover a larger area in the final print which in most cases has no visible effect)
In 8 bit mode you are still working to the nearest cm) in 16 bit mode you can adjust to the mm level and smooth the transition between adjacent colors. Even if you finally output in 8 bit format it should still be closer to looking clean than if you had worked with 8bit values.
So saying many people process in 8 bit photoshop elements and they get good results most of the time. it's mostly pretty unnoticeable except in the areas prone to banding. So yes a technically better result but maybe only you will see the difference.
If you upload to facebook all that effort can be wasted e.g I had a photo of two chimps with a lot of shades of dark gray all that detail was lost as facebook compressed to one shade of dark gray...