2 raw vs jpeg articles...one from ken rockwell

[adam75south]

holy crap, i found two raw vs jpeg articles and one of them really cracked me up.

i found this one very factual and informing.
http://www.popphoto.com/howto/2196/j...explained.html

and then there's ken rockwell. who basically says that there's no difference and if you shoot raw then you will lose your images in 10-20 years. i can't believe people actually take this guy seriously.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

[RichNY]

I've always liked Michael Reichmann and his Luminous Landscape site. I've purchased a few of his DVDs and enjoyed them very much. His are some of the photo vacations that I'd most like to attend.

As for KR, when graded on a curve against his previous writings this is actually pretty good! There should be a warning label when clicking over to his site. When I was first starting out I didn't realize how full of BS he was- he really is dangerous to new photographers.

[adam75south]

I'm sharing what works for me gathered across three decades of continuous full-time paid professional experience in digital imaging. In addition I was studying digital imaging for ten years before I got my engineering degree and started as a professional working with the guys with PhDs in mathematics who invented all this.

and that's the sad part...he will actually trick them into thinking he's right.

it's borderline propaganda.

he writes something like this...

If you love to tweak your images one-by one and shoot less than about a hundred shots at a time than raw could be for you.

but leaves out the fact that you can edit hundreds at a time through programs like lightroom.

and he tells you that you will lose your files because there isn't a raw standard, but completely leaves out adobe's .dng format.

one of these days i'm gonna make a how to website.

[SpecialK]

holy crap, i found two raw vs jpeg articles and one of them really cracked me up.

i found this one very factual and informing.
http://www.popphoto.com/howto/2196/j...explained.html

and then there's ken rockwell. who basically says that there's no difference and if you shoot raw then you will lose your images in 10-20 years. i can't believe people actually take this guy seriously.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

I don't. He's insulting.

[AdamW]

This is all I need to know about Rockwell: here's a well-written well-reasoned point by point refutation of Rockwell's article. And Rockwell calls it a "hate article." (Although to be fair, Rockwell did provide the link.)

[zmikers]

This is my favorite bit in Ken's article about RAW and people who use RAW

Software takes much longer to do the same thing the camera's hardware does, but gives less confident people the chance to try to fix mistakes later.

I guess I am less confident because I use RAW, does that make sense?

[timmciglobal]

Some of the things he's right on such as processing time going up (by a lot if you just used "out of camera jpegs" before) less/no gain for small prints (again assuming you got WB exposure right) and size issues (let's face it, a raw, config files and a jpeg is more space then a jpeg alone)

Having said all that I'd never switch off raw. Being ABLE to do those things doesn't mean one MUST. Often at family events I shoot raw + L jpeg just for the cast of quick prints or stuff I really have no wish to edit.

Tim

[michaelb]

Currently, I shoot in RAW when I am concerned about WB issues - especially when shooting indoors or if I am shooting flowers.
However, I find myself slowly shooting in RAW more and more often, simply due to the flexibility that it offers.

[zmikers]

Here's my question, I've heard some people here say that they are switching back to jpeg now that they are using "Adobe Lightroom." Does anyone have an opinion on this. If Lightroom can do everything to jpeg that could only be done to RAW in the past, it would revolutionize my photographic life, so to speak.

[timmciglobal]

Jpeg can never do what raw can which is adjust white balance before processing or give added headroom in highlights or shadows.

It just can not. If the JPEG value of a pixel is pure white it's pure white. It can not recover anything where the raw value may not be "pure white."

Tim