Chez Spud

Haven’t done one of these for a while, and I thought it was time. In the last Camera Club meeting I mentioned shooting in RAW in passing and then thought it might be worth more than a casual nod in its general direction.

I suspect this is one of ‘those’ topics where everyone is going to have their personal views on what is ‘best’. So I’m going to dive in immediately and say there is no ‘best’, only what works for you.  I started off with my Big Girl’s Camera by shooting in JPEG +FINE (i.e getting the camera to record the image, process it as a JPEG at its highest quality and saving it as such). When I started to use Lightroom/Photoshop to process my images, I switched to shooting exclusively in RAW (as this means I can manipulate the image with as much flexibility as possible without losing data, see below). That said, I often wonder if I’m being overly precious by shooting in RAW all the time as there are downsides (see below), and I think I could get over myself and shoot in JPEG + FINE on many an occasion. The trouble is, I’m addicted to RAW. Because nothing on the planet allows you to rescue a ‘ruined’ shot as much as RAW. It’s hard to walk away from that.

I considered writing a whole big blurb on this topic but decided to let Eliza Claire do the talking as she explained it very clearly on a discussion on Flickr. In her own words:

You always have to process RAW files. They’re basically the image exactly as the camera sees it. JPEGS are compressed and edited in camera.

RAW files are, by their nature, flat and lacking contrast. You have to process to get the contrast back.

The advantage of RAW is that you’re using the full file, every single piece of information that the camera records.

When you shoot in RAW  and, assuming your camera records 12 bits of data, your camera records 4096 shades of red, 4096 shades of blue and 4096 shades of green. If it’s 100% red, 100% blue and 100% green, it’s white. If it’s 0% of all it’s black. If you have a fancier camera which records 14 bits of data, then it will record 16,384 shades of each colour.

When you shoot in JPEG, your camera processes to give 256 shades of each colour. The camera is deciding what shades are most important to you (based on the light in Japan, funnily enough, as the processors are Japanese)

So… if you are shooting in RAW and want to adjust the colour, or the white balance, or pull the exposure up or down, you have far more shades available to play with – so you end up with much less noisy images. When you edit, you’re asking the computer to guess, based on what’s there, what you want the image to look like. With more information there, it makes a better guess.

It’s easy to do a basic edit of a raw file. I edit all my files in RAW then PSD (psd is lossless compression, so keeping all those 16,384 tones of each colour). When fully edited, I then convert to JPEG. At this point, it does take the quality away, but the human eye wouldn’t detect this, at this final stage, because I’ve got the result I want and I’m not going to be tweaking any further.

Scratching your head? Make any sense? I know, it’s really confusing. I think the easy way of looking at it is this…if you want to have full creative control over your images once captured, then shoot in RAW. If you just want to tweak them a little bit, then shoot in JPEG + FINE. This is a wild generalisation but I’m prepared to stand by it. Look at the numbers…JPEG offers 256 of each colour to play with compared with up to 16,383 of each. That’s a whole lot of extra play time in my book.

For me, the downside of JPEGs is the fact the camera is processing for me whereas I’d prefer to do it myself. And every time you edit a JPEG, even the most basic of adjustments, you’re chipping away at it and losing data i.e losing detail in your image and creating noise (baaaaad, noise means grainyness). But the downsides of shooting in RAW is that every..single…image…needs to to be processed and that takes time, even if it’s adjusting the white balance/contrast/saturation/sharpening. RAW images look very flat straight out of the camera. The other main downside is that each file is absolutely massive, so less room on your memory card and less room on your hard drive. That’s a real issue that needs careful thought as it affects the way you store, catalogue and backup your files. JPEGs are much smaller, due to being compressed in camera, and thus present less of a problem in terms of storage. You have to look at the pros and cons and decide which works best for you.

That’s an embarrassingly breezy walk through RAW v JPEG. If you want something meatier in terms of the science then try this article.

But my rule of thumb would be this: mostly happy with the way your shots look as JPEGs? Don’t want to spend a lot of time editing and just want to tweak things a little? Stick to JPEG + FINE. Want to get a bit fancier with editing and don’t mind the time involved editing everything and the larger file sizes? RAW is cool.

Or, better, a mix of the two using the most appropriate for each situation. I could learn something here…

If you liked that, you might like this ...

• Camera Club: Backing Up
• Camera Club: Special Edition…what I learnt this week
• Camera Club…roll up for a Photo-A-Day project in 2010
• Camera Club: Uncle Bob Blues or How to be the Perfect Wedding Guest
• CCC: Guest post…Amber on ‘Shooting Stars’