JPG vs. RAW: Get it right the first time (2009)

If there where some lossy image format that recorded the image in YUV (or some similar color space) and recorded information beyond the black and white point to be able to recover some details and additionally supported some standardized transforms that could be adjusted on top of the base image I think the need for RAW would diminish. Such transforms would be to set the white point, black point, gamma curve, saturation, white balance. If the standard transform data could be edited in an image editing program, the lossy YUV data would not need to be rewritten causing an image degradation.

I never owned a D40X, but I loved the heck out of that D40. I got a lot of great night time shots with it, and it worked very well indoors without flash. I used it so much, I actually wore out the shutter.

I suppose extensions of TIFF would work pretty well for the purpose, the tags describing say sensor layout and even maybe spectral sensitivities.

Heck, Kodak and Nikon also put their proprietary compression schemes in it. Maybe something new and open would work.

Would I suggest most of my family shoot RAW - heck no; I don't want that headache :). But if you're a enthusiast, student, or professional; if you want to learn and eek out the best photos, go RAW. Capture all data you can. Afford yourself the most opportunities today, tomorrow and down the road. You don't want to take that one perfect casual shot of bride's smile or that brilliant sunset or that amazing moment with your kids, only to find out you were under exposed or your white balance was wonky and you blew your highlights or lost your shadows and everybody is a purple dinosaur.

The rest of us are glad there are less barriers to our’s and other’s creative vision, and actively remind photographers that the gatekeeping is not the point

But if you are in a different phase of what fulfills you, try those things

in what quality though? Because the advantage of using RAW+JPEG is that you can set 90%+ quality settings for JPEG in the camera.

Why? The camera applied a very opinionated algorithm to get that jpeg. Your RAW editor is a very large set (virtually infinite) of opinions on how to produce a JPG. Why hyper-focus on getting the exact same jpeg as the one the camera produced? And if you really want that, why not just shoot JPEG?

> b) an even better jpeg than the camera would have produced,

For sure, many RAW photographers will claim they do have default settings that produces better JPEGs than the camera does. However, better is very subjective.

For some manufacturers, their own RAW conversion software will indeed perform such a feat. Note that I would not personally necessarily define that as a "better/great raw conversion tool" - there's many other criteria, and for many of us, once we shoot raw, we don't look at in-camera images/JPEG the same way any more. It is weird and a bit hoighty-toighty to describe, but when I look at scene either in real world or in camera nowadays, my brain automatically sees what can come out of it, i.e. the end result I want, rather than just straight pixels on camera. Or to put it other way, I don't bother to make JPEG come out in any particular way as long as I know I've captured the right data exposure wise, so there'd be zero value to me in a converter that mimicked camera JPEG.

Note that many cameras actually encode a full JPEG they shot INSIDE the RAW. You may notice if you look at file in e.g. ACDsee, it'll first show exactly as you shot it because it uses this JPEG for preview; and then, what happened, a second later it changes, as it loads the RAW. There are tools to extract this JPEG if you so desire.

Otherwise, if manufacturer doesn't have good raw converter, and you use e.g. Lightroom, you can setup a lot of settings to come up pretty close to what camera spits out. But as others have pointed out there may always be fine differences.

The easiest solution of course is to use RAW+JPG shooting mode, bypassing the problem entirely :)

if you dont like the default color profile of the raw processor in the chosen app, you have to import a camera profile or manually adjust and apply in batch. I don't think there is any way around this as the default raw processor is the computational assumption of most correct. Maybe some machine learning and analytics can help a program guess for the user.

I used to save raw files, but that’s just so much more work. Every photo is essentially only half done when it’s shot. With JPEG, the shot is what it is once it’s done. You can make some artistic changes in post still but you can also just send the damn pictures to your friends and family.

Compression isn't the only mechanism by which you can lose information in the process of going from RAW to something standardized and hardware-neutral. So simply using lossless compression doesn't actually mean you're preserving everything. If you really want lossless compression, you probably also want to preserve information about how the raw image was transformed during demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, etc., all of which are somewhat subjective instead of being exact 1-1 transformations where there's a single right way to do it.

In general better glass is available on full frame since camera manufacturers produce pro full frame lenses, but infrequently do so with APS-C lenses. There are exceptions, such as Fuji, but in general the best glass is for full frame sensors.

Because full frame includes the high end, you can get features on full frame cameras that are not available on APS-C cameras.

APS-C's advantage is in lighter, cheaper glass for a given field of view. This is important when hiking! Another option is the m43 format, which has half the sensor area of APS-C, but in turn allows for even smaller and lighter glass and cameras.

It's all trade-offs. Full frame sensors will be less noisy and allow for wider fields of view with better quality glass. But you pay for that monetarily and in size/weight. Is the tradeoff worth it to you? Perhaps not. Or perhaps there is a killer feature that is only available on FF cameras from the manufacturer of your choice that you want, so you're willing to pay the monetary and size cost to get it. If you're really after narrow depth of field, low noise, or extremes of pixels, medium format is there and willing to suck as much money up as you've got available.

The point of full frame would be more flexibility at lower focal lengths, and the high correlation to being put inside of more fully featured and sturdier camera bodies with faster I/O. It doesn't have to be that way, it just is since the wafer cost is already higher and already segmenting customers by price, they just give a greater package to the remaining people that would pay more.

And yes, lenses increase in cost faster than the sensor area they illuminate, assuming they retain the same wide aperture/large incidence angles at the sensor end.

Thankfully, as a photographer you don't have to think about those optical restrictions. It's enough to know that there is a hard limit at f/0.5 that can't be reached with normal lenses (microscope objectives get much closer, though). Practically, everything below f/1.0 is disproportionally expensive.

A 50mm/f1.0 medium format lens would be far better than what APS-C could possibly do, just because you'd hit the f/0.5 wall before you'd reach APS-C.

The downside of larger sensors is that they are more expensive to make (less fit on a wafer, and the chance of catching a bad pixel is higher), and the optics are inherently heavier and larger, as well as often (but not always, if you can get away with a simpler optical design due to needing a less-open aperture) more expensive.

Thankfully, this only matters in two situations: using lenses that reach maximum resolution below f/2.0 with high-density sensors, or operating in darkness/with very short exposures.

Both that very-high-resolution scenario, as well as the darkness scenario benefit from larger sensors. The former from better frame-relative resolving power when diffraction limited, the latter from offering wider crop-factor-corrected apertures and thus capturing more light.

MOST FF sensors have bigger pixels (larger pixel pitch) than APS-C cameras. Noise tends to increase as pixel size decreases. If you crop a FF image down to APS-C size, it'll end up with lower resolution. So the narrower angle of view that an APS-C gets you gives an apparent zoom that can't be achieved with such a FF sensor. Whereas a FF sensor can take wide-angle shots better and has lower sensor noise.

There are exceptions to this. Notably the Sony a7R III, a7R IV, a1, and the Cannon R5 are FF cameras with small enough pixel pitches that they're actually higher resolution after cropping to APS-C than most APS-C cameras. So in these cases, there's no difference between shooting with the FF camera in APS-C mode and an actual APS-C camera.

In general, FF is better for wide angle (e.g. 14mm).

To a lesser extent - if you want a really narrow DOF, it's easier with FF sensors.

Otherwise - no real benefit.

If I’m not shooting anything “important” i.e. no one is paying me to get the shot, i generally just use either JPG or JPEG + Raw but make changes in the camera.

I love the film simulations that Fuji give you. It’s a case of set white balance, set the film preset and go.

There’s something satisfying about the simplicity it.

Learning post processing really well is as much work as learning to use a camera IMHO.

I don’t have enough time to do that as well. Plus, I’m ashamed to admit, I think occasionally I’ve occasionally done a worse job in post than straight out of camera.

I think I’d be too terrified to that for something important though but then I don’t shoot weddings anymore.

Nothing about this applies anymore

Although Apple’s contribution to making RAW a seamless workflow only occurred one year ago, coinciding with the iOS 14 update

I’m sure some Android devices natively shoot raw without an additional app for 5 years

Apple also contributed to the working group to update the protocol and format

The point being that its even more streamlined to shoot and edit and share Raw now even without bulky camera hardware