JPG Follies

[johnastovall]

Excellent article on why shooting JPG in camera is bad idea.

[kenw]

problem #1 is he set the white balance to auto. that has nothing to do with shooting in jpg. it may be a problem for shooting in FULL AUTO, but that's not his attempted point.

and with 30+ years in engineering, i can safely say that people who make a habit of saying "never" are very often wrong.

[barP]

that's an absurd generalization.

as descartes said....all generalities are false.

wp.

[Duffy Pratt]

One of the limitations involved in these results is the skill of the person doing the post processing. In the first example, I'm certain I could do a better job with the JPG than what he has there. That's not surprising, either, since he only used the eye dropper in lightroom. To do a good job with this sort of image in JPG, you would almost certainly need to apply separate curves to each of the RGB channels. The big problem that JPG conversion causes is that it makes for graduated casts that are strong in the midtones but tend to disappear at the highlights and shadows.

At best, I think this article may demonstrate how much easier it is to do the correction when using RAW. It might also demonstrate that he does not have the skill to make a good enough correction on the JPG. But it doesn't show that it can't be done.

Duffy

[rogerfsmith]

Originally Posted by barP

that's an absurd generalization.

as descartes said....all generalities are false.

wp.

So, would that not mean that Descartes statement is also false and therefore since it is false, then we must conclude that all generalities are true!

On a more serious note, I always like to look at the RAW JPG debate in this light: Shooting JPG is like shooting Slide film in the Film era (you needed an exposure that was much closer to right on and you needed to precisely control the tonal range. Shooting RAW is like shooting negative film in the Film era (you had 2 or 3 stops you could be off and still get a decent print).

The above, being said, I still think we should always strive for proper White Balance (in the old days film choice) and "right on" exposures. This is true whether we shoot RAW or JPG. But it is still very important when shooting RAW, because the JPG preview we see on the LCD is built using the WB and parameters that we've set in the camera. We must also be sure to set and reset our parameters based on the overall scene because there is no universal set of in camera parameters that will work for all scenes. With RAW, we are more likely to be able to use a standard set of parameters (to get a good preview). On the matter of previews, we should be sure to set the brightness of the LCD to lower than the normal setting. I've found that one stop above the lowest brightness setting works best for the typical "chimping" type of preview use. We should also be sure to understand how to work with the histogram in the preview.

And just for the sake of side by side comparisons, here is a test shot for everyone to look at:





Cheers,
Roger