RAW vs Other

[EdBoy]

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of shooting in RAW format over any other format such as JPG.

[Rhys]

What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of shooting in RAW format over any other format such as JPG.

Try both to see which you prefer.

Personally, I find RAW offers marginal improvements over JPEG but they are pretty marginal.

[George Riehm]

The same advantages and disadvantages as shooting polaroid vs. film. If you invest in Nikon Capture 4 you will be able to change virtually every image quality setting available in the camera, and minimize lens foibles such as vignetting.

The downside is that you have to post process every shot. Even if that involves only batch processing to JPEG. The extra work is worth the reward.

[cwphoto]

* RAW is typically 10-16 bit colour depth
* Changeable colour space (eg; sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998) etc)
* Choice of export file (JPEG, TIFF)
* Changeable white balance and sharpness (also reversable)
* Control of contrast, brightness, and saturation at no loss

[patrickt]

If you do a search on this and other forums you will find a lot of discussions of this topic.

With my Olympus C5050c I tried both and found no significant difference. Then I got my DSLR and started taking pictures in less than optimal lighting. That's where the raw shines. I shoot exclusively in raw now.

[erichlund]

* RAW is typically 10-16 bit colour depth
* Changeable colour space (eg; sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998) etc)
* Choice of export file (JPEG, TIFF)
* Changeable white balance and sharpness (also reversable)
* Control of contrast, brightness, and saturation at no loss
One minor nit. I've been told sharpness is only reversible if you use the camera settings for sharpness. If you use USM for sharpness and save over the original file, it's permanent. Well, sort of. If you save, then do undo on the USM, and save again, you are back to the original, but my understanding is USM is applied to the raw data, it's not just an EXIF tag.

[Ray Schnoor]

One minor nit. I've been told sharpness is only reversible if you use the camera settings for sharpness. If you use USM for sharpness and save over the original file, it's permanent. Well, sort of. If you save, then do undo on the USM, and save again, you are back to the original, but my understanding is USM is applied to the raw data, it's not just an EXIF tag.
With raw, though, you work with the exported tiff or jpg file in photoshop where you apply USM. In this regard, you still have the original raw file where you can change/remove sharpness settings.

Ray.

[erichlund]

With raw, though, you work with the exported tiff or jpg file in photoshop where you apply USM. In this regard, you still have the original raw file where you can change/remove sharpness settings.

Ray.
In Nikon Capture, you can do all the work on the raw photo. I almost never convert to jpg unless I'm uploading to the web. I just make copies of the raw file and work on the copy.

However, you are correct. If you do your sharpening after conversion, then USM is applied to the jpg or tiff. I guess I should remember that not everyone uses the same workflow. :o

[pip22]

in any event, even when working on a file converted from RAW to TIFF or JPEG, you should leave USM till last and never 'save' the image with USM applied. That's because if you oversharpen and save it, it can't be undone and you would have to start from scratch with the original RAW file again.

And I don't agree with the poster who says difference between RAW and JPEG shots is only marginal. That's missing the whole point of RAW shooting. To a great extent it depends on the camera. Some camera's apply too much processing or compression to images, even at highest quality setting.. Only way to prevent that is to shoot RAW and take control of the processing yourself on a PC. For most shots exposed correctly, difference will indeed be minimal but the point is you can't be sure if a shot is ok (especially indoors with artificial light) until you see it on your PC. That's where RAW plays it's ace card -- it allows you to rescue tricky shots before conversion.