Pixiq

Terrific! You have made it so easy now for me to explain to people why they should shoot in RAW. I talk till I'm blue in the face and they still don't get it. Now I'll send them the link to this article.

But are you really recording all the data your camera captures? Don't many cameras have other sensors, like photo cells, which it uses in doing all those adjustments, in addition to other info such as the flash speed and brightness and exact focus.

White balance is still applied to a RAW file, my understanding is this is not a destructive process in RAW however and altering RAW after the fact in post processing of RAW files is non-destructive.
This makes the chart a little misleading since RAW based white balance is applied before the RAW is written but isn't destructive.

White balance is not applied to a RAW file.

The RAW file consists roughly of 2 parts: the raw sensor data and the camera settings/metadata.

The camera stores which white balance it would have applied to the jpg in the metadata. Lightroom or other converters use this white balance settings or do their own white balance.

Furthermore, there's a preview jpg image in the metadata of the RAW file, this is the one you see on the display, which has all camera processing stuff applied to.

There are some pretty obvious flaws here, Haje. First up is that the user sets the colour, saturation, contrast, and often the white balance. And believe it or not sometimes they set the camera to take the correct exposure. Imagine that. That means that the shot, with its data loss, will print perfectly... Wow.

When it comes to high volume shooting like festivals, fashion shows and sports games, it's JPEG all the way. Raw is a liability with camera framerate and buffer size at these things, not to mention the sheer volume of flash media required.

For low volume stuff, yep Raw is absolutely the king... but it's horses for courses.

What about SRAW on a Canon? Is there any data loss with that file format? I find it frustrating that I'm constantly buying hard drives throughout the year.

What in ya'lls opinon is the best software to use with raw files?

@keith hoover == this is the REAL question... RAW has all those strengths, but it also requires the photographer to do a heck of a lot of after-image corrections... of course some programs are friendlier/easier/cheaper than others, and have shorter learning curves... and I've gone both ways, JPEG and RAW ... and had excellent results with JPEG using Picasa (Google) ... good enough for most uses -- the viewers love JPEG photos exactly as much as those begun in RAW... subjectively, very little difference in real life.

You forgot:

"camera throws away 4 or more bits of information when saving as TIF or JPG, about 33% or more of the originally captured image data"

"camera breaks image into 4x4 blocks at best before lossy JPG compression, effectively limiting resolution to 1/4 of Raw or TIF capabilities"

"combined total of what the camera tosses when writing JPG: as much as 90% of the data the sensor captured is lost forever"

It's amazing JPGs look as good as they do, eh?

Click!
Love and hugs,
Peter Blaise
http://www.peterblaisephotography.com/
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There's another step missing: Going from raw to non-raw, the camera collapses subpixel-information into one square pixel w/o regard for geometry of the pixels on the sensor.

Is that bad? Well, think of the difference between standard-antialiasing and subpixel-antialising.

Also noteworthy: Many of the steps when going away from raw format are good and useful. However, the camera is often not the best at applying them. Sometimes the processing power (although in hardware) is just not there to give the best results. Also there might be alternative algorithms to perform a step, and that is typically best dealt with on a standard computer with all its flexibility.

That said … from a guy who still uses JPEG because it's so amazingly convenient. ;-)

Yes this is endless, here's a recent blog from a fellow professional photographer:

http://friedmanarchives.blogspot.com/2011/08/where-anti-jpg-bias-came-fr...

... and my response:

Hi Gary, and fellow photographers et al,

Re: Raw versus JPG, ad infinitum, ad nauseum

Thanks as always for your thoughtful and honest experience-based insights.

Yes, modern high-resolution JPGs and modern high-resolution printer dither algorithms are splendid, aren't they?

We Raw shooters are NOT anti-JPG -- we use JPG all the time ... for what JPG is best for, just as we use Raw all the time for what Raw is best for.

Let me dig a little deeper and share some of my experience and insights.

Background:

JPG was of course "invented" to allow quick transmission of photojournalist's images over 300 BAUD phone lines from anywhere around the world, and since newspaper and magazine images weren't very demanding, often only black-and-white, the minimum qualities of those JPG images "way back when" were acceptable in the 1990s.

As personal and publisher demands on image qualities increased, with affordable high resolution large format personal and professional printers, the JPG's loss of original image capture information and detail became increasingly unacceptable, and so, Raw image capture was seen as a supportive relief against JPG's loss of flexibility and loss of potential dynamic range, detail, and color.

And Raw provides relief from compression artifacts when cropping and enlarging small areas of an image, and Raw also provides the flexibility to re-purpose an image later with minimum compromise, including recovery of lost highlight and shadow data and HDR high dynamic range processing, and, perhaps most importantly, Raw can be "re-developed" at any time to a variety of different results by any number of competitive and evolving Raw converter programs.

Foreground:

[ Note, some duplicate information already shared here: ]

Yes, we could go on and on forever about the INNER comparisons of Raw versus JPG -- and we'd be right, JPGs toss up to 90% or more of originally captured Raw image information.

And others can go on and on about the OUTER comparisons between Raw and JPG -- and they'd be right, JPGs look fine in most immediate use-cases, are faster in-camera and when transferring data, and have a smaller, cheaper storage requirements.

Yet, personally, I regret my initial JPG-only archive from when I was new to digital photography and I was afraid of Raw because I was unsure if there'd be an easy way to immediately see and use my images, let alone use them in the unknown distant future.

But now I see that Raw are easily opened on demand, even with free programs like Google's Picasa, and I see thumbnails in Windows Explorer with free codecs from Microsoft or extra-cost codecs from others, and storage has gotten faster and cheaper while getting huge, such that 2 TB stand-alone backup drives now cost well under US$100.

My JPG "originals" from my early years are finished, done, kaput, and do not hold up well to revisiting and repurposing, not as well as my Raw archive from later years -- even though both are through the same camera and are the same resolution -- inexpensive 5 MP, not the comparatively expensive 24 MP you initially refer to, nor the 16 MP or even the 10 MP you eventually searched through.

I must admit that even my 5 MP JPGs print sweet to 2x1.5 feet on modern printers.

Yet, the problem is tweaking those JPGs to re-purpose them to my artistic vision today -- those JPGs then crap out, while Raw originals just keep on giving.

All that we now-Raw shooters can do is share our experience and insights accurately, and then wait to say, "... I told you so ..." if and when JPG-only shooters revisit their JPG archives over the years ahead and ask us, "... how can I recover lost information so I can re-purpose my old JPG pictures? ..."

Who knows, maybe in 10 or 20 years, someone may come up with an artificial intelligence algorithm for "recovering" or synthesizing the missing information people might eventually want to "get back" from their JPGs -- sort of the way ACR Adobe Camera Raw can "recover" blown highlights or noisy shadows by synthesizing what "should have been" in blown or noisy pixels from predictive ramp information in neighboring pixels.

So, regardless:

Raw is a lossless ARCHIVE medium;

JPG is a lossy PRESENTATION medium;

Let's be happy with whatever choice we make for our image archive needs and for our image presentation needs, and know the difference between those two needs.

Our only goal in this "debate" is to make sure the uninformed are informed ... if they wanna be.

Click!
Love and hugs,
Peter Blaise
http://www.peterblaisephotography.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterblaise/sets/
http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=728280964
https://picasaweb.google.com/peterblaise