Dropping RAW and going Jpeg

[KeithG]

My first UW rig was a Canon G9 in a polycarbonate housing. Never saw lag times like you talk about.

My prior camera was a S&S DX-1G (Ricoh GX100). 5 seconds per shot was painfully slow.

My current Canon G16 does 1 fps in RAW. Maybe I need to pry open the wallet and spend more money? First step will be to look at my SD card. Maybe it is now the bottle neck.

Thanks for the nudge!

 

[Manneca]

The thing that drives me nuts in the discussion of JPEGs and RAW is the assumption that developing RAW images (in LR or PS) is somehow "cheating". I was diving with a woman in Wakatobi and I asked if she had gotten any images. She said that with shallow diving, light sand and lots of sunlight all her photos would have been overexposed. I suggested that LR could bring the exposure down (in fact, the usual advice in photographing digitally is to shoot to the right, that is overexpose deliberately because most of the information is in the lightest exposures). She said that if she couldn't get a good image with the appropriate settings then it wasn't worth taking and that "fixing" it was cheating.

Pro photographers and serious amateurs have always used processing as part of their creative process. If you'd like proof, go here https://whitherthebook.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/ansel-adams-and-photography-before-photoshop/ and look at the non adjusted print next to the one Adams created.

I really don't care how anyone chooses to process his/her photos. You are the creator of the image; choose whatever method you prefer. Just don't criticize my choice because you think I'm somehow cheating.

 

[Ardy]

Manneca: Anyone accusing a photographer of cheating knows very little about photography. There are a growing group and I think a couple of photo competitions who will not adjust what they take and that is OK with me. It is a bit like free climbing v ropes, one has more possibility of error but it also should have more reward.

I had to put up with what I got, shooting Fuji film and I worked on my technique because of that. I want to improve my photography in camera, not to start 'free climbing' but because it is good practice. I think I have got lazy since moving to digital and my photography has suffered because of it.

Not that it matters too much as I am almost certainly in my last 10 years of diving.

 

[Storker]

The thing that drives me nuts in the discussion of JPEGs and RAW is the assumption that developing RAW images (in LR or PS) is somehow "cheating". I was diving with a woman in Wakatobi and I asked if she had gotten any images. She said that with shallow diving, light sand and lots of sunlight all her photos would have been overexposed. I suggested that LR could bring the exposure down (in fact, the usual advice in photographing digitally is to shoot to the right, that is overexpose deliberately because most of the information is in the lightest exposures). She said that if she couldn't get a good image with the appropriate settings then it wasn't worth taking and that "fixing" it was cheating.

You didn't suggest to her that her settings perhaps weren't entirely "appropriate?

If my shots are overexposed, I close the aperture, dial in a faster shutter speed or adjust my exposure compensation...
8)


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[Shasta_man]

That's the funny thing about "discussions" on the forum: it always turns into "my way is the best because the most extreme implementation of your idea is bad". Discussion about a diet would turn into eating absolutely nothing at all compared to eating everything you see.


Using RAW does not alleviate any of the requirements you need to do when shooting your image. We're not suggesting you just close your eyes and blast away with your infinite magazine. You still need to compose your subject and try to position your light source, etc to get the best shot you can. You still want to shoot the right picture right out of the camera and not HAVE to make any changes. Shooting with RAW just enables you to POSSIBLY recover the shot you wanted if that goes bad while your options for recovering from a JPEG are much more limited. Even low end DSLRs can shoot relatively high framerates of multiple RAW images, so the couple frames you usually shoot are trivial. Most relatively modern computers can process these quick enough and disk space is relatively cheap, so there are really few if any downsides.


I would do the opposite of that suggested by most and shoot all RAW, then after downloading to your device, converting only the ones I want to actually use to JPEGs and I'm done. I'll be keeping the larger filesize RAW images which I can make JPEGs in the future from, but haven't compounded file space waste by keeping JPEGS of my unwanted shots too. With megapixel count relatively high these days, even JPEG images are not trivial in size.


Unless I misunderstood your suggestion, I'd also disagree with the suggestion of always slightly overexposing your images. I always set my camera to slightly underexposed images. While you can always lighten dark areas to recover detail, once an area is overexposed to white, the detail is unrecoverable. You can try it. if you shoot a scene so that your image is too dark, you can always lighten up that image to recover detail, even though there is a limit to how it affects the rest of the image. Whereas, if your image is too overexposed, darkening the image will recover very little detail. It's already gone.


Again, if shooting JPEG's is good enough for you, go for it, but there are good technical reasons to use RAW because the upside outweigh the downsides.


Further, shooting images underwater only kicks that value proposition further to the "worth it" side because of all the environmental issues as well as the inability to just come back and shoot again, besides wanting to just focus on your subject rather than camera controls.


We haven't even mentioned the difficulty of using the tiny camera monitor to judge all those issues.

---------- Post added December 14th, 2015 at 03:14 PM ----------

Without diverting into the next tangeant, I'll also mention for the newer users that lense quality is prime importance. For Canon, that means trying to buy only L series lenses, though you could use non-Canon lenses. There is a big difference between their consumer lenses and the L series lenses. Pleasant shots are still possible with both but I find multiple benefits from sharper images (I can zoom and see every hair in my daughters eyelashes), to more pleasing bokeh (the out of focus stuff in the background has a smoother transition look).

 

[Jak Crow]

I've found several times where I've edited and adjusted my RAWs to the point I like, save, then move to the JPEGs of the same shots and found what I've done to the RAWs are almost exactly the results my E-M1 does with the JPEGs. So while I shoot both JPEG/RAW, and I keep the RAWs in my archive, I frequently don't need to bother with them.

 

[mattia_v]

I'm a dedicated RAW shooter - I often shoot small or medium JPGs on the side (because memory card space is cheap, and JPG is fine for most things and can get shared immediately via my smartphone), but particularly underwater, without additional lighting, even white balancing every few feet won't always result in a nice, accurate image in terms of color balance, even with something like a Magic Filter in place - the Sony RX100 isn't amazing for UW white balance, for example. Yes, you can do a lot with JPG, but things start to posterize and oversaturate very quickly in an 8 bit jpg compared to a RAW file, and the quality of noise reduction (I use a combination of DxO for PRIME noise reduction and lens corrections, Lightroom for local editing, occasional Photoshop and/or Nik suite for more precise local editing) is quite a bit better to my eye. For regular online use at low resolution? Doesn't matter. But the workflow for me is the same whether I'm importing RAW or JPG files, and the latitude RAW provides is significant. I admit I'm less in control of all shooting parameters underwater, since I'm still a pretty inexperienced diver, but I'll take any advantage I can get. By that same token, I still shoot RAW when shooting topside landscapes off a tripod, and do have full control and all the time in the world, and often bracket my exposures.

To each his own, but I see very few disadvantages to a RAW+JPG approach to shooting other than the need to buy bigger hard drives and more memory cards

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

I shoot only jpeg because after returning from my scuba trips in which I took tons of underwater pictures, they just sit on my computer never to be touched again.

 

[Storker]

If you just leave your pictures on your computer and never touch them again, why not just quit shooting?


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[DazedAndConfuzed]

i look at the pictures, but nobody else wants to.

taking pictures allows me to take diving to the next level while doing the same dive as everyone else.