Digital Home Thoughts: JPG Follies

"Few people (at least not those that regularly read this web site) doubt the benefits of shooting in raw mode. But, for those that still don't appreciate the benefits of working with raw files, here are a couple of examples that I recently created to demonstrate this issue to some students at one of my seminars. The purpose of this exercise was that since I almost never shoot JPG, I didn't have on hand any examples with which to demonstrate some of the limitations that JPG files have when strong to extreme manipulations are required. So, to rectify this I set one of my cameras to shoot combined JPG and raw, and took my dogs for a walk around the block. Above is a frame taken in late afternoon sunlight. The camera's white balance was set to Auto. The JPG and the raw files were virtually identical. Below are white balance conversions done in Lightroom. In both cases I tried to normalize the shot by clicking on the bike's license plate as a white reference. The results speak for themselves."



Great tip in this article - use RAW capture mode, instead of the default JPG, in order to get do more during post processing. There are a couple of great examples in the article where RAW files come to the rescue when you images are not correctly balanced or underexposed. Yes, you will likely be able to take fewer images on your storage card and yes, it makes taking images a little slower. However, with larger and faster memory cards now available, I really think it is a worthwhile thing to do.