Nonetheless, I keep wondering if I'm short-changing myself but not sucking it up and checking it out.
This Post was written by s'kat from s'kat and the food.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
So, do you like it RAW, baby?
Just curious as to how many of you digital folk shoot in RAW. I go for jpeg/tiff just because I haven't made the time to learn how to post-process raw images.
Nonetheless, I keep wondering if I'm short-changing myself but not sucking it up and checking it out.
This Post was written by s'kat from s'kat and the food.
Nonetheless, I keep wondering if I'm short-changing myself but not sucking it up and checking it out.
This Post was written by s'kat from s'kat and the food.
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6 comments:
I shoot mainly RAW at this point, and it has it's ups and downs. I wasn't thrilled with the whole workflow until very recently, when I started shooting tethered to my laptop and using Capture One for the RAW processing. It's fast and really good, and I end up fixing all of my color and exposure on the RAW files instead of later on the TIFF or JPEG. Even shooting untethered and just using Adobe RAW has it's advantages though. You can get a couple stops flexibility with exposure correction and getting your white balance right is much easier in RAW. That said, ideally, you get that stuff right on the camera in the first place.
The main reason to switch, however, is in case you think you ever may need to go back to the very original photo and want to output as a different format. For a long time, I shot directly to JPEG... those shots are now stuck in at that resolution and compression level... more than fine for web, but not so great for large prints. If I had shot as RAW, I could go back and output them as TIFFs and get better prints.
If that's never going to be the case for you and you don't spend a lot of time adjusting exposure and color, then JPEG is probably fine.
BTW - there's a good article on this debate here: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm
ditto on all that.
I shoot RAW then use the Camera RAW plugin for PS CS2. I have legacy JPGs because my old camera only shot JPG.. those are all essentially not useful for print if i wanted to go there.
I only shoot RAW in certain situations, mainly if I want shots that I want large size high definition prints of. My other half uses RAW for things like train/airplane photography. We use Apple Aperture. However for things like restaurant shots, process shots while cooking, or shots at markets that are only intended for my blog or small prints at best (which makes up a large percentage of my food photography) I don't bother. It all depends on how you intend to display/output your photos.
I have absolutely no use for the RAW images at this point. Maybe one day. But for now, I'm cooking them down to JPEG. The size I shoot at will still make a nice sized printed photo, I've checked.
I'm notoriously bad at remembering to reset the white balance on my camera when I move from daylight to tungsten, so being able to change in in the computer is essential for me. I used to shoot in JPG and then in RAW+JPG but now I just use RAW. If the photos all come out well and don't need tweaking, I can quickly batch-process them all into jpegs. But for anything I want to tweak, I actually prefer doing it in RAW--I seem to get much better results than when I edit jpegs..
Hey,
No raw for Meathenge, not fine art. Plus it's too time consuming for me. I have very little time for myself and even jacking the contrast and levels a bit sometimes makes me mad. Plus I don't want to give up that much HD space for images I rarely go back to, if ever.
However, when grabbing the rig and heading out to nature or to the city? RAW is the way to go, fer sure, as everyone has so far chimed in on.
And I say yay for Ken Rockwell, gave the boy 40 bux. Enough for some fried chicken and a few beers.
Biggles
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