Talk Snatcher into shooting RAW . . . ?

[Sutton Warrior]

Interesting stuff in some of those links Steve. Reminds me a little of some barbed vs. barbless discussions. Fanatical support for both extremes and some reason in the middle.

 

I would agree with you Newt, its the middle ground I find interesting. Set the camera to RAW/JPEG and you have the best of both worlds.

 

Any one give me an idea how many RAW/JPEG pics can be stored on . . . 100Gb of hard drive . . . ? to many '0' for me to get my head around it

 

I'm just about to order a new computer, built to order, it come with 160Gb HD, I suspect I need a bit more, so now is the time to up the anti! So how may images to 100Gb, the camera (Nikon D80) tells me it will store 109 images @ 'RAW+JPEG Fine' and 130 images @ 'RAW+JPEG Normal' on a 2Gb SD card. So relating that to 100Gb's worth of HD, 5,450 and 6,500 duplicate images respectivly. Dump a lot cos they are 'poor photos'. Thats strikes me as a lot of storage if the maths are that simple?

 

Next question, I normaly shoot in 'Fine JPEG' at 3,872x2,592 pixels, Normal JPEG is 2896x1944 pixels. The way I understand it, the final print size changes, but dots (300) per inch remains constant 'in the camera'. Therefore, it makes no sence to shoot in more than 'Normal size' as the print size would be, Quote: "printed at 200dpi = 14.48x9.72 inches" Thats bigger than an A4 sheet of paper.

 

So, RAW/JPEG or just JPEG, the 'Normal' setting is the one to go for, unless Im getting this all a bit screwed?

 

. . . SW

 

PS Edit! did you spot deliberate mistake,

Edited December 29, 2008 by Sutton Warrior

[Newt]

Assuming 20Mb per photo (which is larger than a paired jpeg/raw photo is likely to be) you could store 5000 of them on that drive.

[Peter Sharpe]

Aside from that Peter, when you convert to tif, do you also convert from 8bit to 16bit? As I assume once your edits are finished you convert back to jpeg before print?

 

Hi Steve, any photos that I have worked on will remain as Tifs when they get put on the server for the designer. If they are good enough in the first place, any unaltered ones will remain as jpgs. For some reason that I have never been able to understand, the designer converts them all to eps format before creating the page PDF.

 

I think this comment from one of the links is the most in line with my own thoughts:

"

It looks like you’ve come to the same conclusion I have recently, RAW isn’t THAT much better than JPEG. And they’re usually not worth the effort and storage unless you’re trying to print very big with close viewing or going to crop tremendously. I just came back from a week’s vacation where I shot most everything in RAW+JPEG (Panasonic FZ30 always creates JPEG when you choose RAW) and didn’t find the RAW were any better than the JPEGs.

 

Additionally, the JPEGs used the white balance that’d I’d selected, giving it the color tone I wanted in each shot, rather than the RAW that applied white balance afterwards (and was often skewed from what I wanted).

 

So it’s JPEGs for me from now on unless I’m planning major cropping or REALLY big prints that folks are going to get close to."

 

I will certainly do a bit of experimenting, but I think that for the vast majority of publishing scenarios, a high quality jpg will be just fine. I have to say that I have sometimes been surprised by how well some of the photos I receive look on the printed page, when I had thought they were quite borderline in quality.

 

I suppose I am influenced by the fact that I sometimes take around 200 photos for a single feature, so that using RAW would be simply too time consuming and would also gobble up SD cards like crazy. There is also the fact that I often work to a timescale that means that photos often need to be sent either by FTP or even email, so RAW really wouldn't be an option (they would take forever to upload). There is also a possibility that somebody might spend a lot of time altering the tones. etc, but not working on a calibrated screen and might not also be working to the required printer settings. I also work blind in this respect, but I know from experience what tends to look about right and at least I haven't wasted too much of my time over it.

 

If you have a fantastically expensive camera and know that you are taking a photo that might be blown up and exhibited, then I'm sure there is no possible argument for not using RAW. It's merely that I don't want people to read this topic and think that RAW is essential for professional use. Probably worth taking the effort if you are commissioned to produce a very special single image, but not necessary for most magazine work.

Edited January 3, 2009 by Peter Sharpe