Comments on: Digital photography - RAW vs JPG

By: Anton

Anton — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:16:42 +0000

My monitor is very simply calibrated (full contrast and brightness set so it is as bright as possible with black still looking dark black), but then maybe I got lucky with my monitor. My laptop TFT is much darker than my CRT so I use my CRT for working on photos.
Prints from online printing companies come out looking far better than on my computer, but that might be because of sharpening/unsharpening that occurs with the print process. Even large prints (up to A3) look really nice from just 6Mpix.

By: Andy Piper

Andy Piper — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:37:37 +0000

I wouldn’t advocate using RAW as an excuse for not trying to get your exposures right in the first place. I’m the same as you, and try to use the histogram to get a decent shot first. But I think the range of adjustments possible with RAW - crucially, without loss of detail - is wider than with JPG. I’ll try to come up with a more convincing argument in the form of some kind of demo of RSP - but it looks like you’ve done a lot of research on the issue.

I have to say that I think I struggle with colour matching, and need to think about a monitor calibrator. I don’t print my own currently, we get them done by commercial services, and they are often darker than I’d thought.

By: Anton

Anton — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:33:51 +0000

Ok, so GIMP is a bad choice.

I had a good look through the RawShooter manual recently, and the software looks like it has a really nice interface, but I am not entirely sure about the benefits of shooting in RAW.

Basically it looks like the adjustments are really, really minor or they could just as easily be done in JPG

By: Phil Willoughby

Phil Willoughby — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 21:41:28 +0000

The GIMP is a bad choice if you’re trying to compare RAW with JPEG, as it cannot handle more than 8 bits/channel and a RAW is 12 bits/channel. CineGIMP is a variant which can handle 16 bits/channel but it was still alpha when I last looked.

In my experience, you can recover a RAW from 2 stops either side of optimal exposure. If you’re only getting 1/2 it’s because you’re processing in an app which doesn’t know how to interpret all the extra bits. I generally use the Photoshop RAW importer as it does a much better job than Canon’s DPP. DPP-processed images look like they’ve been shot through a vaseline smeared window. Dcraw is pretty-good, but it’s a lot more tedious than the graphial PS importer.

As to archiving them, you want to use Adobe’s (free as in beer) DNG converter to convert them to DNG format. DNG is a publicly documented specialisation of TIFF, so it isn’t going to be unreadable any time soon (or ever if you don’t mind writing the software yourself).