Modern sensors are quite remarkable, and pretty much any newer camera can produce good-looking JPEGs so long as you properly expose. With that in mind, you might wonder if you really need to shoot raw files all the time, or if you can go with the ease and convenience of JPEG. This great video will answer that question for you.
Coming to you from The Snap Chick, this helpful video takes a look at the issue of shooting JPEGs versus shooting raw files. The nice thing about JPEGs is that they are much smaller in size and more manageable, particularly as sensor resolutions continue to balloon, creating larger and larger raw files. And while the cost of storage is always coming down, that may still make them a draw for you. On the other hand, they contain less data than a raw file, and thus, they will give you less latitude to work with when editing. Still, there may be situations in which you do not plan to push the file very far and are just looking for a solution that is a bit more convenient and space-saving, particularly if you are bringing home thousands of images. Check out the video above for more.
"If you want to shoot in Raw and use all manual all the time SUPER, you do you." in a very condescending tone.
Eh, I think you're reading into it too much. You're ignoring the 2 other things she mentioned right before that quote.
With foul thought and constricted stupidity like this you have a long way to mature enough to become an artist.
"Off" as in tasty Brie cheese is expected ( or is it essential?), "off" as in putrified snot should be kept in the parental house.
you just described "lefties" in one sentence. couldnt have done that better myself.
I take it you haven’t taken much notice of Dali and Picasso if you think foul thoughts stop you being an artist.
Maybe I'm destined to be a comedian more than a photographer? Regardless, maturity has nothing to do with the ability to have a vision. We're all on this earth to have a good time.
Odd she doesn't mention the concept of non-destructive editing which for me is the cornerstone of raw workflow.
You can do non-destructive editing on jpgs as well.
Also, she was using Lightroom. Unless they've made changes lately, that in itself is non-destructive.
In what scenario would you change the colorspace? If you where to shoot jpg from the get-go, you have most likely set your camera to sRGB.
For your needs, no doubt you would set it up the way you need to. But, I'll wager most prints out there are via sRGB.
In the snap chick's favor she was not wearing a baseball backwards and saying "Hi Guys!"
But this storage war thing is just silly. It is not the 90s anymore, I can buy 2 Tb drive at Best buy for like $59 and a 64 GB SD card for $18.
The point and shoot camera she is reviewing is $1000 so maybe not a push here dummy camera and the user may be interested in more than SOOC.
The statement that she said about the edited raw and the edited jpeg being "nearly identical" is just plain wrong, they aren't and I don't know if it's because of her edit or ?
I use an a7R2 so it has a pretty darn good sensor (as does do most cameras today) but the flexibility in grading a raw is a good thing to have, especially for beginners. Just shoot raw and jpeg, the cost difference is pennies.
Ken Rockwell, is that you?
How about this, You can think of RAW as an unprocessed JPEG that just needs to go one more step before it becomes one plus the benefit of pulling out better dynamic range, color data, and much much more....
Oh wait...
My opinion is RAW is just way more forgiving in post processing. Saved my bacon many times in over or underexposed and even too much noise situations.
What's the point of having a great sensor, going out there in the morning, taking time for composition etc if one trows away 80% of the data? The differences between Raw and JPEG in this landscape shot are more than obvious and should make it quite clear why JPEG is simply a No-Go for anything that goes beyond snapshots.
Exactly. Plus shooting volume of frames to retain only a few interesting ones is not a good process in the first place. May be for sports where action is non stop, but then she choose the wrong picture to illustrate this.
She is yet another one who should post her RAW and Jpeg so we can evaluate if what she says has any merit. What comes to my mind right now are those car shows and home remodeling shows that only work well because we don't see the behind the scene and of course the deleted scenes that may show the imperfections and unfinished rooms.
I love RAW because lI can just gun away all day knowing that it can be fixed in post.
I am absolutely not clicking on one more of these photo rickrolls. I know many news photographers who have to shoot jpeg for deadline and the amount of work they have to do to "fix" any issues with white balance or exposure or hot highlights is painful to watch. Especially those anemic gray areas that were burnt in but look weird because there is no RAW highlight data to "burn" in.
As the other person mentioned hard drives are dirt cheap compared to when I switched to digital in 2000. I now just buy 4-5tb for external mobile drives and 8tb drives for home. I quickly tag and later delete really out of focus pictures during an initial edit in Photomechanic but do not delete anything else. Doing so would take too much time and time is money.
Nothing new under the sun
Almost every image ends up as a JPEG, so it's less a matter of quality than whether or not my camera can produce JPEGs that I like. When I take a photo, I don't always know how I'll want to process it, and shooting raw more easily allows me to decide that later.
I think for those that like to edit minimally and want a simplified workflow, jpgs can work.
on the 5th of december they posted an article about loosing quality on jpgs, quality degradation on jpgs over time. contradicting articles,. great.
Contradicting articles? No, totally different topics.
rewatch the video. editing jpgs,. and than she rambles about tens of thousands of images. raw 20mb jpg being 12 mb, that means 800mb difference per thousand images. i doubt she has tens of thousands or keeper images. but lets say she does. the size difference for 10 thousand images would be 80 gigabyte, 100.000 images would be a size difference of 800gigs. a 4tb drive cost 90$ and holds 500.000 images in size difference. relating to the other story. if you edit jpgs you loose image quality on your keeper images, on your Raw files you dont. are your keeper images worth 90$ or not.
-- "relating to the other story. if you edit jpgs you loose image quality on your keeper images"
What do you edit with, MS Paint?
If you edit in Capture One Pro or Lightroom for instance, you do not lose discernible quality on your original jpgs because the edits are non-destructive.
If you edit in Photoshop or Affinity Photo, as long as you save to their native format (.psd, .afphoto) or a .tif, you do not lose discernible quality when export back to a jpg.
However, you lose quality if you continue to edit and save the same jpg file multiple multiple times; or if you edit and save as jpg1. Then, edit jpg1 and save as jpg2. Then, edit jpg2 and save as jpg3. And so on and on.
While it's technically non destructive, that only means what you're doing is undoable - it doesn't mean the quality of the edit is the same as it is with a raw file. Cause it really, really ain't.
There's no denying editing a jpg is not as good as editing a raw. That's not the argument here. What he's saying is jpg degrades over time. What I'm saying is it doesn't have to.
thank you denni,
did you watch that other video ? on the same site by Nando Harmsen
December 5, 2019. check that one first. i was talking about editing jpgs, not psd, not raw files, not lightroom, not paint, but editing jpgs.
Yes. This one:
https://fstoppers.com/education/about-jpeg-images-and-their-quality-degr...
Where he says, "I decided to open the original JPEG file in Photoshop 2020 and save it as a new second image. I opened that second image, to save it a third time as a new image. Next, I opened the third image and saved it again as a fourth new image. And so on, until I saved it 99 times. With each new file, the software compressed the image, reducing the image quality. This is what I saw happening."
That's basically the same thing I stated on my last paragraph at: https://fstoppers.com/comment/553357
This video did not convince me at all. Do not take hundreds of images if storage space is such a problem. I wasted 5 mins to watch this.
Holy moly. What's with all the JPG love? And so so so so many incorrect assertions in these comments.
Editing a jpg in Lightroom is not the same as editing a raw file. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. Adjust white balance and see what happens.
Shoot a high contrast scene in JPG. Will you keep the highlights or the shadows? Your choice.
Wan't to make a truly great print with smooth gradients? Depending on the image, there is a very real difference between a jpg and a 16 bit tiff.
I don't care anymore. Whatever. Just try it for yourselves and stop blindly following any photo advice.
yup. why is fstoppers promoting this stupidity? next article: Do You Need to Shoot With Your Lens Cap off?
"and stop blindly following any photo advice." should I follow this advice :)
I started photography in B&W and darkroom access. Then I moved, and lost darkroom access, and had to use a photoshop. Then I moved again, and had darkroom access. Then I moved again, and had to use a photoshop.
Using a photoshop was terrible, as they could not get my images my way. They would rarely process the negative as directed, (which would already run everything), and would only get the printing close to correct after for our five attempts at following directions.
Shooting raw is analogous to having darkroom access, while shooting JPEG is analogous to using a photoshop. It is neither convenient nor simple, nor timesaving. It is frustrating, irritating, image destroying and vision killing.
On the other hand, when doing colour, as much fun as the Cibachrome process was, I often appreciated dropping off film, picking up prints an hour later, selecting a few to experiment with in terms of colour corrections, cropping, etc., Then sending them out for enlargement. …And sometimes still having to scream at the clerk, “I sent in a print with the colour corrections and the crop markings. How hard is it too follow simple directions? Do it again, and get it right this time. I am not paying for this.”
Sure JPEG has a certain convenience sometimes, but if one is particular about their prints, one needs to shoot raw.
As for the ”save space” argument, it is true that one can save space, it is false that that is an issue for people buying a thousand dollar camera. It is like telling someone who buys a US$50,000.00 car, and tell them they can save US$260 a year buying regular gas instead of high octane.
I bought two 128GB SD cards for under $100 for my$1,200+ camera. I have never come close to half filling them shooting 24 Mpx uncompressed raw. I have a four-drive RAID5 6TB storage which is mostly empty. I have two 2TB backup drives. Neither are near full.
Counting lights, modifiers, lenses, supports, etc., storage is a minor expenditure. Not counting all that, still a minor expenditure.
Having said that, there are times when certain photographers may not need to do extensive editing, and JPEGs are more than adequate. I am not one of those photographers, so take all I said with a grain of salt.
I shot 680-1.2mb jpegs in 1999 with Nikon D1. I recently looked at some of those old images and I am so grateful to be able to shoot 120mb uncompressed raw files on the a7riv. I wish I shot RAW sooner in my career as I cannot tweak those old images as well as if I had shot RAW.
The cost of storage is the cheapest part of the photographic equation. Don't be cheap.
Fucking hilarious! Some folks on here kickin' and screamin' and throwin' tantrums acting like they are being forced to shoot JPG. LOL!
Listen up, folks that choose to shoot jpg are not going to affect you or your photography. Surely, you are aware of this. Yes?
haha omg smh
You are making the case of all these people who don't care and will never care. People come here for good advices to learn from and pre-canned jpg profiles defeat that point.
Therein lies the problem. For some, jpgs are fine. You're just not getting it.
By any chance, is jpg your personal photo standard? Just curious.
No, I shoot raw. I haven't shot jpgs since around mid 2013. But, just because I decided to switch, doesn't mean I'm going to shame others into doing the same.
Shame others? LOL
Kickin' and Screamin'. Yes. I was referring to the 3 numb-nuts with blank profiles that's getting all irate over this.
My other 10 comments were conversations. People asked and I answered or started a discussion. That's one of the reasons we're here, is it not. It would behoove you to know the difference.
yeah, Black Z is the type of guy who pays top dollar for a one liter bottle of Evian Natural Spring Water, then only takes one sip and throws it away because it saves time and it's quenched his thirst for that moment and he doesn't care about some future time when the water might be useful.
Will one sip suffice?
Just because people might not know better doesn't mean it's the right thing to advocate.
Lol, you have the most asinine analogy. No wonder you get yourself all riled-up over nothing. Over something so trivial. Yes, RAW vs JPG is trivial. Do you know why? .. .. Because you have a choice.
You are the one who is single-handedly defending this Black One Z. Black One Z = Snap Chick?