HOP 33: Does RAW vs JPEG Matter?

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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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Excellent episode today! Mr Pruitt, you did a fine job in demonstrating the difference between the two formats. Keep up the good work!

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Thank you very much. Just trying my best to help others get better. Thanks for all the support. Means a lot. Seriously.

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I’ve mostly used RAW over the years and your show shows just why you should.

The only times I’ve not used RAW was when on holiday in England and Harz. I filled up the first memory card in a day and quickly switched over to JPEG for the rest of the holiday, purely because I only had the camera and a limited number of memory cards with me.

The last couple of holidays have been in the car and I could pack my laptop and an external drive to store the day’s images on, so that I never had to worry about memory cards again.

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I agree, excellent episode. Question: if I want to avoid having to get a CC subscription, what’s a good alternative to Lightroom? DarkTable? I’ve used to use the Canon software to process raw. Are other packages better? Will have new camera around this time next month hopefully :grinning:

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I do not use raw. There many reasons to use it but I am afraid of the digital obsolescence of the format. Each camera has its own format and there is no guarantee that we will have software that will be able to read it after a few years. This has happened many times in the past.
For this reason I use jpeg even though there is still a risk. I just hope that because it is a standard we will be able to read it for a long time.

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I hit this exact problem with my entry into digital photography just over 20 years ago. I bought a Kodak DC-215 1 megapixel camera (IIRC it was actually just under 1mp but rounded up to 1). To get the highest image quality I used the new open standard lossless compression file format FlashPix. Almost no modern image programs support FlashPix now, including programs that supported the format for over a decade.

Fortunately having been burned in the 80s by spreadsheet file formats going obsolete I was watching carefully and made sure I converted all my original photos to another lossless format a decade ago.

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I always shoot raw. If I shoot JPEG, it’s raw + JPEG. Storage is cheap and raw provides too much flexibility to give up.

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I don’t think you need to worry about obsolescence. Canon/Nikon raw will stick around. Many apps support them. My CR2 files from over ten years ago open up in Windows just fine.

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This is a known issue with digital preservation. The format may be well supported now I do not doubt that. But it has happened before and will happen again. I prefer to stick to industry standards with wide adoption that have more chances of not becoming obsolete.

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Guess could convert the ISO raw format TIFF/EP which is what DNG (digital negative) files from Adobe are.

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You rocked this as usual Ant!! Thank you

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Darktable, Luminar and Raw Therapee are options. Thanks for the support, sir :fist_right:t5:. ((also Affinity and capture one ))

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I shoot raw because I know I’ll screw up exposure somewhere. :slightly_smiling_face:
Thanks for watching, sir :fist_right:t5:

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I’m not able to open newer Canon raw files in win10, but I can open older canon raw.

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Thanks a lot, my man. Your support means a lot :tumbler_glass:

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That is something I never considered. I switched to RAW only a few years ago for all the reasons demo’ed in the episode ( which was well done as @Pommster and @Slickster noted ). I think I have just assumed that since a lot of these editing apps seem to handle all the RAWs well enough, there wouldn’t be an issue. But I could see a world where one of the brands wins and their format becomes the standard standard…

I always point out that JPEG was intended for preview images on the web, never for use in production.
JPEG is for finished images and only intended for low quality previews because it is lossy and throws away info it thinks you won’t notice, even at 100% quality.
The camera reduces the palette to fit in a 24 bit table.
So it means you better get it right every time as you won’t get to fix very well after.

RAW is like using negatives. It is at least 96 bit.
With negatives when the image is not correct you can make a new one, instead of trying to correct the finished photo which lacks lots of the info still in the negative.
All that visual info your eye cannot see now becomes important as it is in there and can be made visible.

Anyone that shoots RAW has every opportunity to convert them to a more portable format now and worry about obsolescence when/if it actually happens.

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It’s more likely that the format will evolve rather than disappear because of competition. But yeah that might happen as well.

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I shoot both! I shoot Raw on my Canon 60d and JPEG with my mobile devices. I can get great results either way.

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