My magical photographer friend from Australia Roy Hopwood sent me a message after my last post on RAW vs. JPG . In it he mentioned a few reasons why he has favored JPEG over RAW. I was reminded by his statements that I had the same concerns before finally deciding to shoot RAW.
Size Matters:
One of the biggest problems with which both Roy and I struggled is the fact that RAW images, especially if you add a JPEG as well, take up a lot of space on memory cards.
Both Roy and I shoot the Nikon D50. This camera uses SD cards and is old enough that it does not support the new high capacity standard. That means that the largest card that can be used is 2 Gigabytes (GB).
When I shot JPEG only, even 1GB cards would hold nearly 1000 images. Shooting RAW plus JPEG as I now do, a 2GB card holds fewer than 250! Size is an important problem and a difficult one to handle.
I have addressed it in two ways. I now have multiple 2GB cards
Needed Skills:
Another issue is the fact that RAW images need more manipulation than JPEGs. When you shoot RAW, each of your images must be loaded into an image editor to be converted to JPEG so people can see them on their computers easily and so they can be printed or used on the Web. The first time I tried shooting RAW every image I loaded into my editor looked terrible.
At first I thought that this was because I had been taking terrible pictures all along, but the camera was fixing them for me. RAW images have absolutely zero processing done to them in the camera. They are nothing more than the raw representation of the photons captured by the image sensor. Of course they also contain some very significant metadata; some of which we see as EXIF information even in our JPEG images.
But I also noticed that no matter how I processed them I was unable to make these images look as good as the JPEGs had looked. It turns out that the problem was with my software, Corel Paint Shop Pro. The RAW converter they provided was terrible. (Newer versions of Paint Shop Pro
The Right Tools:
Even so, software is very important when processing RAW images. It is critical to use software with a good RAW converter. I can’t speak to the converter in The Gimp, but the latest versions of Paint Shop Pro work well as do Adobe products such as Lightroom, Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements.
If you shoot Nikon like Roy and I do, I’d strongly recommend that you get a copy of Capture NX
It’s great for a lot of reasons that I didn’t initially understand. Most importantly NX never touches the original bits in your RAW image. It always makes a copy and works on that. The copy is stored in the same file as the original image, so this behavior can be less than obvious at first glance. This means that anything you do to the image can be undone completely and harmlessly. That simply isn’t the case with any JPEG image unless you use layers for every change you make.
More Reasons:
When you shoot RAW you can make any adjustment available within your camera (other than stuff like zooming out or changing aperture or shutter speed) after the fact.
So if you accidentally left the camera in Manual, or if your flash wasn’t ready, and you underexposed the most important shot of the day by two stops because of it, you can just adjust the exposure. Take a look at this example.
Open this in Capture NX and drag the slider to show +2 EV…
…and out comes this:
If, like me, you also occasionally leave the world of automatic white balance, and then fail to check it before shooting, you might end up with a color cast you don’t want. This too can easily be corrected completely in “post” with no degradation of the image quality and zero skill on your part beyond knowing how to make a selection from a drop-down list.
This was shot using flash with the camera set to tungsten white balance by mistake.
A quick change just as simple as the one above in Capture NX…
…yields this:
For more information see:
