Why use raw?

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:23:46 -0500, JP
wrote:

Ok so i patched my S3IS. I like some of the tools that came with the CHKD
patch. one is the ability to shoot raw images. so now not only do I get
the jpg but also the crw. photoshop won't recognize these images. gimp
will now that its patched. The CHKD Wiki it says to use Raw Therapee. It
won't recognize these images either. Playing with a raw file was one of
the reasons I wanted to get a dslr. I'm kinda thinkin, what's the point?
Are there things that can be done to a raw image that can't be done to a
jpg? What file format is best to save them as? The raw is around 35 megs.
a tif saved to 17 megs. Jpgs from the camera save to 2.5-4 megs. I'm not
done beating my brain on this yet but I really think I might need some
counseling.

Thank you,
JP

Most commercial raw converters won't ever recognize the CHKD raws
because they aren't "official" On one of the sites, the Russian one if
I remember right, there is a crw to dng converter. Just drag the raw
files you want to convert into a folder and let the program rip.

Raw files are very useful in low light photography-(something I seldom
see mentioned by our complaining experts so maybe there is something
new to add about RAW files). After all what is a ISO 6400 image?--an
ISO 800 image that underexposed by 3 stops.

I'm now using the GIMP converter UFRAW with its bilinear
interpolation mode to convert the files. Bilinear is a plain vanilla
interpolation and unlike other interpolation modes it doesn't try to
'improve' the image--something that makes noisy images worse.

Then I use noise ninja to clean up the image. This workflow doesn't
perform miracles--the S3IS isn't the quietest camera around--but it
does let me get images I might normally pass up.

I would check your raw file sizes--with a S3IS at the max resolution
they should be a little over 7 megs

Save as high quality jpeg. And naturally archive the raws since they
are your 'negatives' Most of the time Tiffs just waste disk space.

jpc

On Jun 20, 9:53 pm, JP wrote:
Pat wrote groups.com:



On Jun 20, 9:23 pm, JP wrote:
Ok so i patched my S3IS. I like some of the tools that came with the
CHKD patch. one is the ability to shoot raw images. so now not only
do I get the jpg but also the crw. photoshop won't recognize these
images. gimp will now that its patched. The CHKD Wiki it says to
use Raw Therapee. It won't recognize these images either. Playing
with a raw file was one of the reasons I wanted to get a dslr. I'm
kinda thinkin, what's the point? Are there things that can be done to
a raw image that can't be done to a jpg? What file format is best to
save them as? The raw is around 35 megs. a tif saved to 17 megs.
Jpgs from the camera save to 2.5-4 megs. I'm not done beating my
brain on this yet but I really think I might need some counseling.

Thank you,
JP

Oh, Gawd, please don't start this debate yet again.

Google is your friend. Either search this group within your
newsserver or go to google groups and search it there. It is a weekly
debate and nothing new is going to be written for a long, long time.
You might as well read the archives. It's cheaper and easier than
therapy. Google is your friend.

Thank you. I will. I have been reading but, as you may have
guessed, I'm somewhat early into my education.

You say this is a weekly debate. Either I havn't seen it in months or,
my memory failed me, again. Either is just as likely.

JP

Okay, here's the synopsis for you. There are 3 camps, two of which
are loud and vocal.

Camp RAW loves it. They contend that it gives you absolute control
and that the post processing isn't too bad. RAW does everything for
you, includes making coffee. The size of the file is larger, but disk
space is cheap.

Camp jpg hates it. They content that you should shoot the picture
right in the first place and then RAW doesn't do too much for you.
The files are smaller, computers handle them better, and the format
will be around forever -- while the jury is still out on the
proprietary RAW formats. Camp jpg also hates it that RAW has excludes
rights to capital letters, being always RAW while no one ever uses
JPG.

Camp Tweener thinks that all tools have the right and wrong uses,
including jpg and RAW. Tweeners think that there are no right or
wrong answers, just levels of appropriateness. There are times to use
it (such as bad lighting conditions) and times not to (your nephew's
birthday party). While Camp RAW and Camp jpg rant at each other, Camp
Tweener realizes that no one will be converted and keeps getting
migranes.

Camp Tweener thinks that all tools have the right and wrong uses,
including jpg and RAW. Tweeners think that there are no right or
wrong answers, just levels of appropriateness. There are times to use
it (such as bad lighting conditions) and times not to (your nephew's
birthday party). While Camp RAW and Camp jpg rant at each other, Camp
Tweener realizes that no one will be converted and keeps getting
migranes.


Camp Tweener thinks that there are levels of appropriateness.
With my DSLR I always use RAW, especially on my nephew's
birthday party!

Why do I always use RAW.
1. Then I only need one workflow.
2. Then during the shooting I do not have to make decisions
about WB / sharpness / color intensity.
3. Using Raw will sometimes give you better results than
even a good planned jpg.

In general it's less work for in general better pictures.
But it's not for most camera's and it's not for most people,
because it needs some extra knowledge. And there are
a lot of situations where RAW does not or hardly improves
the picture.

So allthough in most situations jpg is great and no RAW is
required. Because for me there is hardly a disadvantage in
RAW, I use RAW when I can. (With my DSLR).

During my first vacation with the DSLR I only had an
limited amount off memory. (Was still expensive).
So I could not do RAW.
But with White Balance, sharpness, color intensity,
I did not have enough experience to actually use that
in my advantage so that was all done on the 'auto' setting.
Now using RAW I do not have to think about those things
during shooting.

Compared to film discspace is so cheap that the extra
memory needed on the computer (and backups) is no
problem.

Ben

On Jun 21, 3:46 pm, "ben brugman" wrote:
Camp Tweener thinks that all tools have the right and wrong uses,
including jpg and RAW. Tweeners think that there are no right or
wrong answers, just levels of appropriateness. There are times to use
it (such as bad lighting conditions) and times not to (your nephew's
birthday party). While Camp RAW and Camp jpg rant at each other, Camp
Tweener realizes that no one will be converted and keeps getting
migranes.

Camp Tweener thinks that there are levels of appropriateness.
With my DSLR I always use RAW, especially on my nephew's
birthday party!

Why do I always use RAW.
1. Then I only need one workflow.
2. Then during the shooting I do not have to make decisions
about WB / sharpness / color intensity.
3. Using Raw will sometimes give you better results than
even a good planned jpg.

In general it's less work for in general better pictures.
But it's not for most camera's and it's not for most people,
because it needs some extra knowledge. And there are
a lot of situations where RAW does not or hardly improves
the picture.

So allthough in most situations jpg is great and no RAW is
required. Because for me there is hardly a disadvantage in
RAW, I use RAW when I can. (With my DSLR).

During my first vacation with the DSLR I only had an
limited amount off memory. (Was still expensive).
So I could not do RAW.
But with White Balance, sharpness, color intensity,
I did not have enough experience to actually use that
in my advantage so that was all done on the 'auto' setting.
Now using RAW I do not have to think about those things
during shooting.

Compared to film discspace is so cheap that the extra
memory needed on the computer (and backups) is no
problem.

Ben

Just for the record, any post that contrain the word "always" takes
one out of Camp Tweener and sends them to another camp.

Pat wrote:


Okay, here's the synopsis for you. There are 3 camps, two of which
are loud and vocal.

Camp RAW loves it. They contend that it gives you absolute control
and that the post processing isn't too bad. RAW does everything for
you, includes making coffee. The size of the file is larger, but disk
space is cheap.

Camp jpg hates it. They content that you should shoot the picture
right in the first place and then RAW doesn't do too much for you.
The files are smaller, computers handle them better, and the format
will be around forever -- while the jury is still out on the
proprietary RAW formats. Camp jpg also hates it that RAW has excludes
rights to capital letters, being always RAW while no one ever uses
JPG.

Camp Tweener thinks that all tools have the right and wrong uses,
including jpg and RAW. Tweeners think that there are no right or
wrong answers, just levels of appropriateness. There are times to use
it (such as bad lighting conditions) and times not to (your nephew's
birthday party). While Camp RAW and Camp jpg rant at each other, Camp
Tweener realizes that no one will be converted and keeps getting
migranes.

Or k-f'ing certain threads.....pretty nice summary, and since the Joint
Photographic Experts Group gave rise to the acronym, it's good to write
"JPEG" but I guess we've become used to .jpg, and hence write jpg, due
to the extension being so common in lower case.

--
john mcwilliams

On Jun 21, 8:45 am, Pat wrote:
On Jun 20, 9:53 pm, JP wrote:





Pat wrote groups.com:

On Jun 20, 9:23 pm, JP wrote:
Ok so i patched my S3IS. I like some of the tools that came with the
CHKD patch. one is the ability to shoot raw images. so now not only
do I get the jpg but also the crw. photoshop won't recognize these
images. gimp will now that its patched. The CHKD Wiki it says to
use Raw Therapee. It won't recognize these images either. Playing
with a raw file was one of the reasons I wanted to get a dslr. I'm
kinda thinkin, what's the point? Are there things that can be done to
a raw image that can't be done to a jpg? What file format is best to
save them as? The raw is around 35 megs. a tif saved to 17 megs.
Jpgs from the camera save to 2.5-4 megs. I'm not done beating my
brain on this yet but I really think I might need some counseling.

Thank you,
JP

Oh, Gawd, please don't start this debate yet again.

Google is your friend. Either search this group within your
newsserver or go to google groups and search it there. It is a weekly
debate and nothing new is going to be written for a long, long time.
You might as well read the archives. It's cheaper and easier than
therapy. Google is your friend.

Thank you. I will. I have been reading but, as you may have
guessed, I'm somewhat early into my education.

You say this is a weekly debate. Either I havn't seen it in months or,
my memory failed me, again. Either is just as likely.

JP

Okay, here's the synopsis for you. There are 3 camps, two of which
are loud and vocal.

Camp RAW loves it. They contend that it gives you absolute control
and that the post processing isn't too bad. RAW does everything for
you, includes making coffee. The size of the file is larger, but disk
space is cheap.

Camp jpg hates it. They content that you should shoot the picture
right in the first place and then RAW doesn't do too much for you.
The files are smaller, computers handle them better, and the format
will be around forever -- while the jury is still out on the
proprietary RAW formats. Camp jpg also hates it that RAW has excludes
rights to capital letters, being always RAW while no one ever uses
JPG.

Camp Tweener thinks that all tools have the right and wrong uses,
including jpg and RAW. Tweeners think that there are no right or
wrong answers, just levels of appropriateness. There are times to use
it (such as bad lighting conditions) and times not to (your nephew's
birthday party). While Camp RAW and Camp jpg rant at each other, Camp
Tweener realizes that no one will be converted and keeps getting
migranes.
I imagine you are a "Camp Tweener" person. I will admit I shoot
nothing but raw when using a DSLR, but those of us in the raw group
hardly thing raw will fix all faults in an image. What I do believe is
that shooting raw makes my life far easier, even when I am shooting my
nephew's birthday party. I have no problem with someone not shooting
in raw mode, if that is the workflow you like go for it. But I would
highly suggest to anyone to try a raw workflow for a while, and if you
camera can shoot raw+jpeg do that so you can see the difference.

There have been a large number of cases where someone posts a photo
that did not come out the way they wanted and ask what they can do to
fix it. In many cases if they had been shooting in raw the ability to
get a good photo would have been far better.

So I guess I don't see exactly why it would be inappropriate to shoot
a birthday party in raw.

As far as other being converted, that are a lot of people who will
decide what workflow to use based in part of what they read in these
groups. There are a huge number of people who read the threads that
never post to them.

Scott

JP wrote in
:

Ok so i patched my S3IS. I like some of the tools that came with the
CHKD patch. one is the ability to shoot raw images. so now not only
do I get the jpg but also the crw. photoshop won't recognize these
images. gimp will now that its patched. The CHKD Wiki it says to use
Raw Therapee. It won't recognize these images either. Playing with a
raw file was one of the reasons I wanted to get a dslr. I'm kinda
thinkin, what's the point? Are there things that can be done to a raw
image that can't be done to a jpg? What file format is best to save
them as? The raw is around 35 megs. a tif saved to 17 megs. Jpgs
from the camera save to 2.5-4 megs. I'm not done beating my brain on
this yet but I really think I might need some counseling.

Weighing in at 35MB, I guess RAW becomes quite cumbersome, especially on
a camera not desgned to write such large files. I can't imagine how the
RAWs can be that big; the RAWs on my Panasonic FZ50 I thought were very
large at 20MB for a 10 MB camera, and they are as big as they can
conceivably be - 16 bits per pixel (for 12-bit data, worthy of far less,
especially at high ISOs). Even with uncompressed, 16-bit data, 35MP
would suggest a 17.5MB camera, which the S3IS clearly is not.

Between the large size of your files, and the lack of support, there
doesn't seem to be much immediate use, but RAW is actually quite valuable
if you want to get the most out of your camera.

First and foremost, JPEGs tend to clip away highlights that are not
clipped in the RAW file. For DSLRs, usually a stop of green highlights,
1.5 stops of blue highlights, and 2 stops of red highlights are clipped
away in JPEGs with a normal contrast setting. Lower contrat settings may
use another 1/3 to 1/2 stop. For compact cameras, less is usually
clipped away, but there is always data in at least the red or blue
channels that has a stop or more, useful for getting detail in clipped
white highlight areas that are not present in JPEGs.

You can either use the extra highlights of RAW as a safety buffer, or you
can intentionally expose higher to take advantage of the higher signal-
to-noise ratio.

Secondly, RAW allows you to use a workflow that doesn't cause any
significant or visible posterization of your data; you can choose all the
basic image adjustments at conversion time in a full-fledged converter,
and output to an image-processing program in 16-bit precision, where you
can manipulate it further without concern. JPEGs turn ugly pretty quick
with a lot of post-processing. You get the best results when your image
stays at 16 bits until a final conversion to 8-bit for display.

JPEGs are often rendered with a clipping level even worse than what I
mentioned above. For certain colors, JPEG conversion in-camera boosts
one or two color channels to achieve a saturated look, at the expense of
color accuracy and detail. This creates a feeling, for example, that red
flowers are going to blow out "in the camera", when actually, they are
only blowing out in the JPEG, because the JPEG converter is trying to
make the flower look as excited and saturated in the JPEG as it looks to
us in the illusion of human vision (the red flower is actually quite dull
in the empirical world). The threat of blown red flowers makes people
back off on exposure, increasing the noise in the image. When shooting
RAW, however, the red flower is actually a bit darker in the red channel
than a white shirt is, in the red channel, even though the JPEG is more
likely to blow out the flower. There is really no reason to back down on
the exposure for a red flower in RAW; in fact, you can often use
aggressive positive EC without blowing anything in the RAW; you simply
have to back down on the exposure in the converter, or reduce saturation
of reds, to avoid the blown-out look, or you can keep that blown look,
but with a better exposure.

Another thing about RAW is that it allows you to make decisions about
most camera settings after the fact. The RAW image is only affected by
the exposure and the ISO setting; none of the other camera settings that
affect RAWs affect the RAW data. White balance, contrast, color tone,
sharpness, etc do not affect the RAW data. They are siomply recorded as
metadata to enable a RAW converter to emulate the parameters of a JPEG
with those same settings, and are ignored by default with some
converters.

--


John P Sheehy

"ben brugman" wrote in news:C-
:

Compared to film discspace is so cheap that the extra
memory needed on the computer (and backups) is no
problem.

RAW is a no-brainer for me on my Canon DSLRs; they write fast and are
efficiently compressed - there's no reason to limit image quality with
JPEG. RAW gets a little uglier, however, on a camera not streamlined for
it. My Panasonic FZ50 writes out uncompressed 16-bit RAW files, at 20MB
each, and 6 to 7 seconds for each write, in which time I can not take
another picture. I really need RAW on the FZ50, as its JPEGs are quite
ugly. However, whenever I am taking shots where I need to take the next
one quickly, I have to bite the bullet and shoot JPEG.

--


John P Sheehy

Michael Johnson wrote in
:

I also have the
hacked firmware on my 300D so I can shoot a JPG right along with the
RAW file. I then rip out the JPGs with Breeze Browser Pro. It gives
me the best of both formats with the disk space penalty, of course.

I really miss the embedded ful-res JPEGs of the 10D. The 20D, 30D, and
400D all embed 1.5 and 2.5 MB JPEGs, which are useless for zooming in on
the review, and too small if they are good enough that I don't need to
convert the RAWs. The only way to see full res on the review LCD with the
later cameras is to shoot JPEG-only! Canon makes some *really* pathetic
decisions.


--


John P Sheehy

John Sheehy wrote:
Michael Johnson wrote in
:

I also have the
hacked firmware on my 300D so I can shoot a JPG right along with the
RAW file. I then rip out the JPGs with Breeze Browser Pro. It gives
me the best of both formats with the disk space penalty, of course.

I really miss the embedded ful-res JPEGs of the 10D. The 20D, 30D, and
400D all embed 1.5 and 2.5 MB JPEGs, which are useless for zooming in on
the review, and too small if they are good enough that I don't need to
convert the RAWs. The only way to see full res on the review LCD with the
later cameras is to shoot JPEG-only! Canon makes some *really* pathetic
decisions.

I never seem to get much useful information from the LCD anyway.
Anymore, I am barely able to focus my eyes on something that close.
Getting old sucks.