RAW AND JPEG(YET AGAIN)

Friday, January 27, 2006

Much has been written about the debate of raw vs jpg. I am adding mine to it now because I now have some personal experience to quote. So far, I always used to shoot raw, but last time, I sensed a possibility of running low on memory and hence decided to switch to jpg and try it out. This was the first time I was going to try shooting jpeg.

At least you can't tell much when you are in the field. Your LCD does not show much difference whether you shoot raw or jpg. I found quite a few differences when I loaded the images to the computer. Here they are. Keep in mind that the issues like sharpness may be limited to my camera(Canon EOS 350D) and the firmware version(1.0.1) and can't be generalized. But issues like white balance are universal.

Sharpness: There is a considerable loss of sharpness in the jpg images. When I shoot raw, I sometimes manage to skip unsharp mask to the images, or apply very little of it. For example, a typical raw image is treated with USM settings of 75, .8, 4. But the jpg images badly needed sharpening. Most of the time, the values applied were like 125, 1, 0.

Problem with Exposure correction: It is much easier correct the exposure in the raw file. I had a few images that were slightly underexposed(May be by 0.5EV). It would be no trouble at all to fix that in the raw image, but I had to work hard to restore it in the jpg image without spoiling the image. I can't say this conclusively, but I think the in-camera jpgs came out slightly darker than they should.

White Balance: I did not face any problem with white balance, but was afraid I might. It is fairly easy to fix white balance issues in the raw image but is a major task if you shoot jpgs. During late evenings or tungsten light conditions, it’s probably impossible to shoot leaving the white balance setting to Auto.

Loss of contrast? This is another thing that I can't say for sure - it may be true or it could just be a perception. I felt a loss of contrast when I shot jpgs. For the jpgs I shot, I almost always ended up applying local contrast enhancement - something I apply rarely when I shoot raw. I would be able to confirm this problem only if I try both raw and jpgs for some more time. But unlikely that I will shoot jpgs again.

These are the problems that haunted me. Of course, there are advantages shooting jpgs. One is the memory needed to store them, which is what forced me to shoot jpegs this time. It will also save you some processing time since you don't need to convert the raw files. That is useful if you shoot a large number of images. And if you are not too bothered about the quality - like if you are shooting some picnic or such events, which do not require stringent quality, why bother to shoot raw? Personally, I find the problems mentioned above to be fairly serious issues and hence I would continue to shoot raw unless I am running low on memory.