RAW OR JPEG FILES ....

Hello to you all!

I am now getting some reasonable results with my SONY F-828 camera ... but
recently encountered problems at the photo printers!

I had moved to using RAW files ... rather than 5 million pixel JPEG files
.... and it turned out that the RAW files were encoded! This meant that I
could only view the shots at home on my computer with my SONY editing
program! However, JPEG files are readily viewable!

Can anyone tell me if there really is a drastic difference of photo quality
with a 5 million pixel JPEG?

Regards,

Jon

Hi,

There is a small problem with RAW files and that is that they are not
all compatible between different manufactures of camera's and even
between different models of cameras made by same manufacturer. This
creates difficulty opening those files by image editing software.

Quality difference is not really an issues in your case, as you are
taking it to printers and the result for standard photo print out like
10x15 would be the same. On the other hand if you are blowing up the
images to rather large scale the jpeg compression artifacts might show
up on the photo so the uncompressed RAW images that you created would
produce a better result.

Why not shot in RAW and then convert the files to TIFF format so
printers can open it. If you are worried about quality being lost with
jpegs.


chesham wrote:
Hello to you all!

I am now getting some reasonable results with my SONY F-828 camera ... but
recently encountered problems at the photo printers!

I had moved to using RAW files ... rather than 5 million pixel JPEG files
... and it turned out that the RAW files were encoded! This meant that I
could only view the shots at home on my computer with my SONY editing
program! However, JPEG files are readily viewable!

Can anyone tell me if there really is a drastic difference of photo quality
with a 5 million pixel JPEG?

Regards,

Jon

I did just that a couple of weeks ago. The TIFF files were each about
35MB and getting 18 files off the CD into the AGFA system took about
20 minutes. The guy behind the counter kept looking over to see what
was happening.

--
Joan
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joan-in-manly

"Dan" wrote in message
...
: Hi,
:
: There is a small problem with RAW files and that is that they are
not
: all compatible between different manufactures of camera's and even
: between different models of cameras made by same manufacturer. This
: creates difficulty opening those files by image editing software.
:
: Quality difference is not really an issues in your case, as you are
: taking it to printers and the result for standard photo print out
like
: 10x15 would be the same. On the other hand if you are blowing up
the
: images to rather large scale the jpeg compression artifacts might
show
: up on the photo so the uncompressed RAW images that you created
would
: produce a better result.
:
: Why not shot in RAW and then convert the files to TIFF format so
: printers can open it. If you are worried about quality being lost
with
: jpegs.
:
:

You need to understand what RAW is and then the peculiarities of shooting
RAW with the 828.
Unless you are shooting in a studio and/or have significant time between
exposures the 828 is difficult to use in RAW format because of the slow
write time to compact/flash memory card. This is partly because the 828 RAW
files are recorded with no compression, unlike dSLR RAW files.
You should also make a series of test exposures using color charts or a
subject with a wide range of color and tonal values using the 828 in jpeg
and RAW and see if there is a significant quality improvement with shooting
in RAW.
My experience with this camera is that if I turn down the sharpening using
jpeg (I prefer to sharpen myself) there is little diference in color
fidelity between jpeg and RAW modes with the 828. This is decidedly not the
case with, for example, the Nikon D70 where the color differences between
jpeg and RAW can be startling. Also the sensor in this camera lacks even the
exposure latitude of sensors in dSLRs (which is only fractions of an f-stop
anyway) so that shooting in RAW mode, even applying tricks like deliberate
underexposure (a la the Nikon D70) does not yield images with more usable
detail than shooting in JPEG with the 828.

"chesham" wrote in message
...
Hello to you all!

I am now getting some reasonable results with my SONY F-828 camera ... but
recently encountered problems at the photo printers!

I had moved to using RAW files ... rather than 5 million pixel JPEG files
... and it turned out that the RAW files were encoded! This meant that I
could only view the shots at home on my computer with my SONY editing
program! However, JPEG files are readily viewable!

Can anyone tell me if there really is a drastic difference of photo
quality
with a 5 million pixel JPEG?

Regards,

Jon


There are the same number of pixels in either JPEG or TIFF. The difference
is the degree of compression.
Every time that you save a file in JPEG format, some information is lost.
Eventually that loss becomes evident.
It does take more than a few saves for the loss in information becomes
serious, but remember that the loss is permanent.
Jim

Hi Jon

With regards to your questions, here are my opinions:

1) If you're an average digital camera user, then just shoot in JPG and
be done with it. If you're shooting and just printing photos at a print
lab, then I think JPG will do - but make sure you use high quality JPG.

2) The RAW image format offers you the purest possible pictures, ready
for your editing on the computer. The RAW format is proprietary and
each manufacturer (Canon, Nikon, Olympus and the like) use their own
version. When you take a picture in RAW format, the camera does nothing
to the photo. There is no adjustment at all - the picture is purely
what is recorded by the image sensor on the camera.

3) The JPEG file format is the most popular image file format in the
world today. It's very popular because it saves a lot of hard drive
space. A high-resolution picture with 25MB of color information can be
shrunk down to about 1MB using JPEG compression.

The downside of JPEG? Well, bear in mind that each time you edit and
save a JPEG image, you're losing image quality. Some photographers
who want maximum image quality will avoid using JPEG totally.

4) The TIFF image format is the reverse of the JPEG format. A TIFF
image consumes a huge amount of disk space. We're talking about 6MB
to 18MB for a typical TIFF images. That'll eat up your hard disk in
no time. However, TIFF images are of extremely high quality - there
is no data discarded when you work with or save a TIFF file.


If you want to learn more, then check out these articles about image
formats:
http://www.basic-digital-photography...mpression.html
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm


Best Regards
Gary Hendricks
http://www.basic-digital-photography.com