Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Ahh, Ken Rockwell.

I think any burgeoning camera enthusiast goes through the phase of taking Ken Rockwell seriously and reading him voraciously - I did and most of my friends, colleagues, and Facebook photo enthusiast acquaintances seem to:). He is fun, encouraging, and opinionated. He gets some basics right, and he's moved a million enthusiasts along the learning curve; he makes you feel you're in on the real deal and are learning deep dark simplification secrets from an established Pro. But eventually you outgrow him - the more technical or specific or factual an issue gets, the better, in general, you may be to read around.

Re topic of the article - I indeed shot JPEG my first couple of years, right around the time this article was published, and argued incessantly with professionals based on Ken Rockwell math. Then I shot my first wedding in RAW+JPEG just to be safe, and have only shot professional engagements in RAW since.

There absolutely positively is a time and place for JPEG as well as RAW. And I'll agree with his first piece of advice: If you have to ask shoot JPEG.

But almost everything below that is either wrong or skewed or biased or incomplete. RAW has tremendous benefits, for prolific and occasional shooters alike, and now I firmly subscribe to Thom Hogan's philosophy of "optimal data capture", whether I do <50 shots on a carefully managed studio shoot, or 3000+shots (with second photographer etc) on a busy wedding weekend.

(mind you, I'm happy to see Ken still going, and I hope he continues to encourage generations of photographers; it can be a somewhat thankless gig, as he does get teased and challenged around the web a lot and as I said, most people tend to "outgrow him"; but he provides a great push and interest at a right time in photographer's growth and career - when you start getting deeper, and forums and experts tell you how complicated everything is and how ignorant you are and how much you'll fail, he cheerfully encourages you to shoot everything you can with anything you have - and that's a great attitude to have :)

JPEG is quite old by now. The reason I shoot RAW is mostly to adjust contrast, saturation, white balance and recover some highlight and shadow details.

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.

tiff is a universal format

Long ago, I listened to his advice and bought a Nikon D40 (6 Megapixels) instead of a D40X (10 Megapixels). His argument was that the sensors were the same physical size, so the light gathering per pixel would be less, and thus images would have more noise in the D40X.

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.

Yeah, the time that Bill Gates said that you only needed 6MP... ;-)

I wonder if that advice was correct, but I have no way of proving my gut feeling that the D40X was the better choice in most situations.

> and thus images would have more noise in the D40X

I've never understood this argument.

In insufficient light conditions, noise will be identical between the two, because resizing the 10MP image to 6MP will give the same result as the 6MP camera. (But you still get the choice of more-noise-but-more-resolution at 10MP.)

But in sufficient light, noise is drowned out by signal, and so the 10MP camera truly produces a 67%-better-quality image.

It turned out to be very useful for getting shots nobody else could get inside a fairly dim Church.

I'd go so far as to say most photography situations don't involve sufficient light, you're always pushing the ISO up to make up for a lack of light. Only daytime outdoor shooting would really benefit from the extra pixels.

That's exactly what I'm saying though -- inside a dim church, the 10MP camera takes pictures that, when scaled down to 6MP, are identical to what the 6MP takes in the first place. You need to be a little more aggressive with ISO but the "extra noise" disappears upon downscaling.

While with daytime outdoor shooting, the 10MP genuinely gets you 67% better quality.

If it's not worth the extra $$$ then fine, but the idea that only sensor size matters (and not resolution) is just false.

You are absolutely correct; but if you pixel-peep, it's easy to mislead yourself / misunderstand what you're looking at and "see more noise".

That's a prime example how Ken's logic sounds intuitively correct but is technically incorrect and will lead you down the wrong path.

Mind you, nothing wrong with d40; it was my first DSLR too and I loved it to death; also, back then, there WAS some additional noise due to additional electronics between 6mp and 10mp which meant that less light actually reached the sensor, so he wasn't completely wrong :)

Unfortunately, that misconception caused much rage throughout the decade, for example when Nikon released d800, which was 36MP compared to it's beloved predecessor d700 12MP. Internet went bananas on "where's our low light camera". To this day, there are people who firmly believe d700 had "better low light". (I've owned and used both side by side professionally and while I loved my d700 and enjoyed couple of UI/UX choices better, there's no comparison; d800 has better images, period).

Photography could use a well described lossless compressed format that can handle various forms of sensor data.

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.

Are you thinking of something like modern .DNG? If not, let me know what the deltas are :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com