RAW for Nat

[Dave61]

Re: RAW for Nat

Thats why Dave I will be shooting in RAW+Jpeg with my 100D when I take pictures of birds and similar whilst I have left my full frame 6D on Jpeg seeing that my church and concert pictures are fine.(take a look at my Aled Jones pictures taken last week).

Hi Nat I did see the Aled Jones shots and thought you did great, as I did comment.

[El Sid]

Re: RAW for Nat

A lot depends on what you shoot and maybe how you used to work in the film days.

When I first started shooting digitally I decided to shoot raw format. Now partly this was down to discussions like this plus magazine articles and books but also partly because raw meant making my pictures the way I wanted them not the way Kodak or Fuji wanted. In my film days I never had a darkroom (lack of time and space mostly) so I stuck with with negative film (for holiday shots) and slide for 'serious' photography which meant getting it right or as close to right as possible in camera and living with the consequences. I did have a try at masking slides to adjust the composition but I was never happy with the result and I felt it was simply too obvious in projection and looked like I'd made a major boo-boo...

Raw on the other hand was a revelation, now I could crop to my heart's content (well as far as 3Mp would allow) without it being dreadfully obvious and I could adjust contrast and saturation and make light bits dark and dark bits light - I was like a dog with two tails!...

On top of this I'm rather fond of tricky lighting conditions and raw really is the better option when the light gets complicated, means I can mess about with partial white balance adjustments, multiple exposure adjustments and a host of other tweaks and that makes me happy. But if it's not your thing then there's no point in doing it because it's the 'done thing' as it can be time consuming and that will put some people off.

Up until recently the only reason I'd shoot JPEG is in situations where where I know I'm going to have far too many shots to willingly mess about in raw with or when I'm desperate for card space - though with modern cameras and cheap cards this is now less of an issue. I might also shoot JPEG if the end result has no real likelihood of being a 'serious' shot... The only reason I'm now shooting some JPEG + RAW work is that a couple of recent acquisitions are too modern for my antiquated version of Photoshop/ACR - though I now know that one is not so recent that my copy of the OEM software can't read the raw files so that may cut out the JPEG requirement - on the other hand I might still save a minimal size JPEG for reference on Bridge...

In short RAW is for them as likes likes it but JPEG is fine for those as doesn't...

[Nathaniel]

Re: RAW for Nat

I have actually been out today and taken some RAW+Jpeg pictures and I have downloaded them to my computer. I will now play around with Jpeg & RAW and see how I get on. Will post the images in due course.