New to RAW and Adobe, Please Help!!

[venchka]

Thanks Scott.

Another way to think of the JPEG file format: A Loosey Goosey Approximation of a guess with the least amount of information of what the original looked like.

[zebulus]

Originally Posted by srwatters

I don't know about you all, but it's not RAW, it's RAWR. Because every time I press the shutter I make that noise.

Yeah, your quite the He-man with all those beautiful models running around in your studio,lol.

[KobraCarry]

So I've been shooting with RAW more and more now. One thing I've noticed is that after I tweak, and convert and save as Jpeg and look at the original RAW and converted Jpeg side by side, the RAW still looks better. Can I get the Jpeg as good as the RAW? Is there a way to directly print from RAW?

[MT Stringer]

Can anyone explain to me why a person would make JPEG files in their camera? If they had a choice?

Huh?

Bueller? Bueller? Anybody?

Let me see, I shot 1100 pics at a softball game that went into extra innings. I don't want any part of 1100 RAW images to go through. JPEG is fine with me for sports.

NOTE: I don't have all day to play around with the images.

If I'm shooting a few hundred wildlife pics, then it's RAW for me.
Just my 2 cents.
Mike

[iCe]

I'm the other way around. I always shoot RAW. I open in Bridge, select all, write my EXIF info (copyright and contact info) to every file, keyword every file, quickly rate the images. 5 stars keep, 4 stars look again later. The rest I keep but filter the 5 star images first. Command A (Ctrl for the PC people); Command R, open in ACR, Correct the White Balance... Night football will ALWAYS want some WB correction. Even when I set the WB to a fixed temp... it shifts due to the lights. Most of the time I can select a group of images by eye and set WB. Tweak exposure, black point and brightness... again as a group. I might spend 2 hours on 600 images... Less if the lighting is good. Three if the lighting was exceptionally bad. Save all as TIF giving them a spiffy name. Open CS4. Select my night football action, Select File---> Automate... set everything up. Tell it to run... go to bed... When I get up the next morning all of the images have been processed (noise removal and a few other actions) and saved as L10 JPGs to their own folder. So... it doesn't take all day... just a few hours... Workflow... it's all about workflow...

[groovyone]

Originally Posted by MT Stringer

Let me see, I shot 1100 pics at a softball game that went into extra innings. I don't want any part of 1100 RAW images to go through. JPEG is fine with me for sports.

NOTE: I don't have all day to play around with the images.

If I'm shooting a few hundred wildlife pics, then it's RAW for me.
Just my 2 cents.
Mike

Why not just batch them and go to bed? I start my bigger batches before bed, although with my new laptop it is way faster. That way you can still tweak a few if you want.

My thoughts on RAW vs JPG...

When I first got my A100 I shot jpg all the time. I was learning and shot a LOT, and only had a 1GB CF card and little HDD space. I shot RAW on rare occasion when I KNEW I wanted to play with the photo some. 1 year later, enter the A700 with arguably one of the WORST in camera JPG conversions ever. By day 3 I was shooting ONLY RAW and haven't looked back.

I do wish I had shot more RAW with my A100. It should would have made cleaning up some of the photos a TON easier. Now I keep looking at compacts but won't buy one that doesn't offer RAW.

*forgot to add, I was processing A900 RAW files on a 5 year old Compaq laptop. Very time consuming but worth it. Batch processing took 3-5 minutes per photo sometimes. =(