Photos courtesy of Amazing Travel Photos
A photographer that recently switched from film to digital writes: I just got my fancy new digital SLR. Should I shoot Camera RAW or JPEGs?
Ever since August 2002 when Adobe released Camera RAW 1.0 plug-in, this question has come up. There are often fierce debates about this subject. It is almost as religious an issue as the Nikon vs. Canon debate.
RAW = Negatives, JPEG = Transparencies?
The RAW Image files contain all the unprocessed information from the image sensor in your digital camera. Raw Image files are analogous to digital negatives. Each camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. Nikon has Nikon Electronic Format (NEF) files. Canon has Canon RaW (CRW) files. Adobe invented a universal format called Adobe Digital NeGative (DNG). Like negative film, digital negatives contain the most information, but require significant post processing.
JPEGS are analogous to transparencies, aka slides or chromes. Likes slides, they can be viewed without any further processing. But they are already processed so things like white balance are cast in stone. That is a lot less flexible than choosing the WB during post-production. And JPEGs are compressed using lossy compression meaning information is thrown away. So with JPEGs you save time in post, but you loose both flexibility and some quality.
Shoot Negative or Positive?
The photographic process is naturally a negative process, meaning there are two steps: first a negative is produced, then a positive from the negative. In 1935 Kodak introduced Kodachrome positive transparency film. The issue of whether to shoot positive or negative has been something to consider ever since.
It is well known that slide film contains less information than a negative. The dynamic range of slides is 5 stops compared to 7 stops for negatives. Even worse, any areas of a slide that is overexposed becomes clear. This means all the information in blown highlights is lost. Negatives, on the other hand, only get denser with overexposure. So the highlight detail is still in there even if you can’t see it in a normal print.
Chromes for Commercial, Negs for Retail
During the decades when film was dominant, commercial photographers typically shot transparencies. Retail photographers (portrait and wedding studios) shot on negative, aka print film. One of the reasons for this has to do with the final deliverable.
Retail photography studios primarily delivered enlarged prints. So it made sense to shoot negatives. The lab could also create copy slides from the negative that a photo studio would use for presentation to upsell to their customers. The work flow at pro labs that catered to portrait and wedding photographers, like Miller Professional Imaging in Pittsburgh, was set up to handle negatives and make prints.
Meanwhile, commercial photographers delivered slides to the film scanner for digital pre-press. Obviously negatives can be scanned as easily as slides, so why not shoot negatives? I believe this was because of the division of labor where a photo studio produced the slide and a service bureau did the scanning. Photographers preferred to deliver a transparency for scanning because it was easy to show whose was at fault if a scan was bad. Just throw the slide on a light table and look. But when a negative is scanned poorly, there would be lots of finger pointing because you can’t directly view a negative with the orange mask and all.
Also, stock libraries also preferred positive transparencies to negatives. For a customer what you see is what you get. Having a negative in one place and an 8×10 print somewhere else is a hassle.
Shoot RAW or JPEG?
So using the analogy of RAW=Negative, JPEG=Slides, are we observing the same pattern that commercial photographers use JPEG (Slides) and retail uses RAW (Negative)? No it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. I think the reason is that the division of labor and resultant finger pointing has gone away. Digital cameras eliminate the scanning step. Now it is purely a quality vs. time issue.
Quality vs. Speed
Photographers who deliver only a few images with extensive post-production might opt for the flexibility and superior quality of the RAW format. Nowadays, most advertising is heavily composited, meaning the final image is a composite of multiple elements. So commercial photographers would probably opt for RAW. Portrait and wedding photographers would also choose RAW to allow re-touching without loss of image quality.
Photographers who are under a tight deadline or deliver lots of images might choose to shoot JPEGs which require no post production. This might include newspaper photojournalists and pro sports photographers.
It really boils down to how much time you can spend on post production. If zero then JPEGs are the only way to go. Now if you are the kind of guy that wears a belt and suspenders, you may opt to shoot both RAW+JPEG. But this uses a lot of space.
Here is the website for Miller Professional Imaging which has been servicing wedding photographers for many years.
