Do all top bird photographers use Raw?? (1 Viewer)

[arjacee]

Hi all.

I have been photographing birds for about a year and a half. My skill has gradually improved and I am eager to keep improving. I usually go out and shoot alot of photos. Recently I have really tried to take more Raw shots not that I wasn't happy with JPEG, I was. More because after reading lots I feel that is what I should be doing. However I'm not really sold! I realise that I am able to change the white balance, saturation, noise etc etc but more often than not I am happy with my JPEG images and they take alot less time to edit and process. I know this is blasphemy but I'm just not sold on Raw. Am I missing something? I realise that professionals shooting weddings inside may need to change the white balance or saturation or batch edit but for shooting birds??? Also if I take 600 / 700 pictures and my computer shows both JPEG and RAW it takes ages to go through! Any thoughts are appreciated. I've tried I really have but is the extra time / effort worth it?? Thanks

 

[joespy]

I reckon all professional photographers, not just bird, use Raw as an insurance to make sure they end up with "the Shot" that sells, after all it's how they earn a living. I'm like you in that the burden you're left with, in terms of PP is too much. I don't have Light room or any other software that gives easier viewing access to pics so I only use Raw if the lighting/conditions are not good for that particular session. High quality Jpegs are quite sufficient for me and I regularly print at A3 size for our camera club comps. for which I've had some success.
It's said that large areas of one colour e.g. skies, can show feint lines where file compression occurs, can be problematic, but I've never had that.
Cheers Joe

 

[Mono]

The two professional photographers I know both mainly shoot in JPEG. The things that make great photos are subject and composition they both come from the brain behind the camera. The main failings in bird photography are incorrect focus point, the post rather than the bird sat on it. Plus camera shake and subject movement both symptoms of trying to push your lens to far. You can correct none of these by post processing RAW. RAW can be a hobbyists curse, folk get to enjoy the playing about in Photoshop as much as they do taking the photographs. If you feel that shooting in RAW is getting in the way then stop and concentrate on getting the shot right in the first place.

 

[njlarsen]

I have started shooting in Raw + jpg so that I have access to the high quality jpg right off and can go to the raw if I want. I use ACDSee Pro5, and pp using raw vs using jpg is about the same, so I increasingly find myself just using the Raw to process. Part of the reason for that is a more intuitive control of white balance, but I can change white balance from a jpg as well.

The biggest disadvantage of the raw images is the space they take up on the harddisk.

And no, I am not a professional, I have had a couple of images published but never received money for it

Niels

 

[fugl]

I'm also a non-professional, but it's raws for me too which I archive & trot out as "negatives" whenever I want a "print". I find it both comforting & liberating to know that however I modify a photo in post-processing, there's always an unalterable original to return to if go too far or make some other mistake. Sure, the raws take up space, but so what with storage of anything digital so cheap these days?

 

[locustella]

I am not proffessional photografer and not top photographer, but the truth is that RAW contains much more information. For example you can increase or decrease it's brightness by up to 2 F stops. In case of jpg, brigter black would get only uniformly gray, without details, and darker white areas would be gray, without details too. RAW contains such information, but it is simply out of range of given final image, like jpg.
The same situation is for example with white ballance and any other color filtering. You can apply new filter to RAW easily, jpg contains less colors and such correction gives much worse results.
Converting RAW to jpg is almost like taking a new picture.

 

[Brian2]

I've been to a couple of presentations by top wildlife photographers and they seem to shoot RAW so that when they get "the money shot" they can sell it and the buyer can blow it up to a marketable size....maybe for a poster or billboard etc. without losing the sharpness. Personally for blog images JPEG suits me fine but it does limit the size of print when you want to do that.

 

[Barred Wobbler]

This isn't what you would call an example of a exhibition or print quality photo by any means, but it is a demonstration of what RAW can bring you.

A couple of years ago I went to St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai to get Sinai rosefinch and other desert specialities. We were picked up by our taxi at Sharm at 4am, timing our arrival at St Catherine's for dawn so as to get there before the disturbance of the pilgrims as they came down from Mount Sinai.

As we approached our destination in the half-light of dawn I spotted my first ever white-crowned wheatear near the road and got the taxi to stop while I fired off some shots of the lifer. In my excitement I forgot to check my camera settings and assumed I was on aperture priority. It was only after I checked the play--backs and saw a black screen that I realised I'd left the camera on Manual from when I'd been taking photos in strong sunlight the day before. I was in light that could at best be described as half light and I was accidentally shooting at 1/2000 sec, F7.1 ISO400.

A shot I took on aperture priority a couple of minutes later (partly backlit - the bitd had flown up onto a lamp standard) was still under-exposed at 1/320 sec, F5.6, so my first shots were underexposed by about 4 stops.

Fortunately there were plenty more white-crowned wheatears about later, but I kept a couple of my original shots as a demonstration of RAW.

The first shot below is a slightly cropped, but unedited copy of the small jpeg I have the camera set to keep. The second is an edit of the RAW file with about the same crop, pulled back from the brink..

As I said - hardly exhibition stuff but it could have been a one-off, never to be repeated rarity shot. Fortunately, it wasn't.

 

[Roy C]

A simple answer to your question is YES, and not only top bird photographers but also most serious amateurs who want to get the best out of their equipment. For my part I have not shot in jpeg for over 6 years (apart from a little p&p that I pick-up recently) I would be completely lost not shooting in RAW to be honest.
It comes down to two choices: Do you want the Camera to decide what it thinks is the best settings to apply to an image OR do you want to decide yourself?
For instance a simple thing like sharpening when done by the Camera is applied to the whole image whereas when you do it yourself from a RAW file you can apply it selectively, same goes for noise reduction, saturation, contrast, levels highlights/shadows adjustments and almost anything else. You could attempt to do this with a jpeg but the in-camera processing/compression has already thrown away a good deal of the data from the original image so you have very little left to play with and remember that jpeg is a lossy format.
The one big drawback to RAW (apart from the time it may take processing the image) is that image processing is another thing to learn, it ain't easy and takes a long time to master something like photoshop but well worth it in the end. A lot of folks would be amazed what you can do in a program like photoshop, very often the finished image bares little resemblance the original capture. I am lucky in that I enjoy the processing side probably as much as actually taking the shots (sad I know but I can assure you that I am not alone by any means).

As a final though it is no coincidence that most of the very top bird photographers are also the best at image processing IMHO

 

[locustella]

Regarding brightness tolerance maybe it works like in this crapy attachment. Density changes proportionally to log exposure only on the straight portion of that curve. It is very long in case of RAW.
And later only part of saved information is being converted to jpg, tiff or whatever. However during conversion to JPG you can adjust brightness using appropriate software, what can be imagined as moving smaller JPG's curve up or down (green arrows). Because the exposure tolerance of RAW is very large - it keeps more information then is saved in given jpg.
JPG itself can't be adjust so easily, because white and black fragments of an image are located on the toe and sholder portions of it's smaller curve. They don't contain information about details.
Perhaps this is not proffessional explanation, but probably not very far away from it.
And RAW allows to change exposure setting like white balance for example.
Moreover JPG is compressed file - its resolution may be worsened like someone mentioned earlier.
http://motion.kodak.com/motion/uplo...etters_filmEss_06_Characteristics_of_Film.pdf

 

[kitefarrago]

This is a personal choice. Why are you taking photographs? What do you want to do with them? How often do you find yourself in situations where the shot will be inevitably gone forever and you need all the extra insurance you can get?

There are plenty of professional photographers that take jpgs (press photographers, for example - there's no time for a lot of processing and the resolution in a newspaper printing isn't that good anyway). There are plenty of hobby photographers who are very happy with the jpgs they get straight out of the camera, and the prints they get from those. I don't think there's any point in making them feel guilty that they're not `doing it properly' - they're doing it for themselves, and their own satisfaction is all that matters.

I take the vast majority of pictures when I'm on holiday. I may well not ever get to the same place again, and some situations may never arise again (lion chasing leopard into a tree?). With the kind of photography I do, lighting can change rapidly (sun-lit subject to one hiding in the bushes). I'm not a good enough photographer that I can make all the changes I'd ideally like to make in that situation (white-balance, iso, possibly aperture vs shutter priority, compensation) before taking the shot while being sure that the opportunity will last. Also, moving about carrying a camera and binoculars means that my camera's setting often get changed without me realizing it - and when a subject does appear I can't always check whether they're all what I thought they were.

By taking images in raw I give myself a much better chance of recovering photos that would be a lost cause otherwise. For me it takes the pressure off - I try to get everything right, and I know how to do that if I have the time, but sometimes it just doesn't happen. Yes, it's possible to change the white-balance, etc, for a jpg - but every manipulation degrades the image quality. I really like the fact that with a raw I don't have to worry about that. There's even a chance that future software improvements might make it possible to recover from a bit of camera shake, or focus not being quite where it should be - I'll still have my raws to make use of that down the line.

Since I've started to use Lightroom my enjoyment of post-processing has increased enormously - everything you ever do to your photo can be undone again, and you don't have to worry about what you save and when. For the vast majority of my images all the adjustments I ever want to make can be done in Lightroom, and much faster than when I created a bunch of layers (one for brightening the subject, one for taking care of the sky, one to use curves for more colour adjustments...) in my quest to ensure I could undo previous decisions.

Still, it does take time. At the end of my most recent trip the group decided that we'd create a shared Flick-r group that would allow us to share images. I think everybody else was taking jpgs, and within a week or so they'd all uploaded the images they wanted to upload. I sent out an email last week, months after we'd got back, to let people know they might want to check the group again because I'd finally added my last images. I'm pretty sure that the rest of the group was happy with the pictures they got (and there are some really good ones), and that they wouldn't have wanted to do what I did. I do understand that, I've just made a different choice, but that's a personal matter.

So, do what you're happy with and don't worry about doing it right. But before you make a `final' decision, make sure you've got sufficient info to make it from an informed perspective.

Andrea

 

[Robin Edwards]

Good points made there Andrea.

I am in every way an amateur and chose when I got my first DSLR to default to RAW and haven't taken jpeg images other than on my point-and-shoot camera, since Having said this, I know that probably 90% of what I've taken would have made no difference (just as rubbish!!) for what I use my images for, had they been in jpeg.

I too am a great fan of Lightroom and like the ability to reset any changes made in LR and try to improve on what I might have rushed or been lazy with in the past - or maybe in the future my processing skills will have improved and I can go back on a few images knowing that what I have is the direct uncompromised output data from my camera.

I don't think it is fair to say that all professionals will only use RAW any more than saying amateurs will not. It's what works for your situation and some may like the challenge of processing their images as much as they do taking them in the first place.

 

[seaspirit]

All digital cameras take RAW images!
Depending on your settings and the cameras abilities the RAW file can be kept and stored, or it is converted in the camera to a jpg file. This conversion is partly controlled by your settings (sharpening, white balance, color balance ...) in the jpg menu, but most is left to the discretion of the camera software.

So if you decide to work in a RAW workflow you will have to do the conversion with its choices and decisions all by yourself (OK, lightroom and other converters have auto functions that do a job similar to what would happen in the camera), and as other post already point out you can take advantage of the wider dynamic range of RAW files for exposure compensation, white balance etc. Like everything in life it is a learning curve and after letting lightroom do its job when building the previews using some auto functions the full manual raw processing can be left to the few brilliant shoots picked after previewing and reviewing the lot.

No matter if you shoot jpg or RAW, the only way to keep control of the images accumulating is to weed out (i.e. delete) the bad ones. And not only the bad ones, you really only want to keep the good and the great ones. The big challenge is to say bye bye to the images that are non-keepers.

Why keep the raw files after conversion? Well, each new generation of Raw converter so far has been doing a better job in noise reduction, sharpening etc., and over time ones skill level in image processing also advanced. It's nice to be able to go back to gems from the past and give them a new look and use.

Ulli

P.S. I think most Pros use RAW, except for quick and dirty jobs (press and some event photography). Even in those they store likely both just in case the $1.000.000 is presenting itself. Storage space in camera and on computer is cheap and not really a limiting factor anymore.

 

[Wildmoreway]

The only time I used RAW was when I had a Canon EOS400D, the jpegs on that camera were a joke. since I switched away from Cannon I have only ever used Jpegs. I don't have any commercial aspirations for my shots and prefer to spend my time in the field rather than working on images. Were I a professional or a "top flight amateur" I would doubtless use RAW, as it is Jpegs satisfy my needs.

 

[arjacee]

Thanks so much for all the kind responses. I need to get more into post editing. I usually use Picasa because it's quick and recently started using Paintshop Pro x3 which is good but everything takes me ages so I usually go back to Picasa ( which I love ). I have seen Lightroom mentioned many times but know nothing about it. Until recently my computer only had 1G of Ram so most options were out. Now I have 3 so more doors have been opened. Is Lightroom a programme where everything can be done? Also I found the two pictures ( one dark and one light ) posted by Barred Warbler to be the most easy to understand and clear illustration of what Raw can do. I fully realise that if I had taken that dark picture as a JPEG I could not have got it back like he did. Thanks so much for that! Anyway lots to think about. In 10 days I will be taking some pictures in Thailand and then some in the U.K and I want to get the best possible photos so will try to think before I go about what I want to do. If anyone has time could they look at some of my pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/49985242@N08/collections/72157629458530049/ and tell me how I could improve my editing! Thanks again. Bye