I recently became a regular reader of Jared Polin’s FroKnowsPhoto.com photography blog. He he has a ton of great videos and publishes quite often, ranging from a weekly post processing edit of readers’ RAW files to video reviews of camera gear to unboxing of new cool stuff. Oh, and his grandmother Lil often appears as well, she’s 100 years old, by the way.
Jared, aka Fro, is also one of the reasons that I decided to finally splash the cash and buy one of the expensive 70-200mm f2.8 lenses. Not the Nikkor though, way too expensive, but the cheaper Sigma 70-200/2.8 HSM II version. I’m waiting for it to get in stock, hopefully sometime this month. Jared often recommends this very lens. He is also the reason why I’m seriously considering the Think Tank Sling-o-Matic 20 camera bag. I recently got the Lowepro Slingshot 300AW camera bag which I’m kinda regretting already… let me know if you want to buy it, but act fast 🙂
Anyway, go check out his site if you’re into photography. Jared might be the kinda guy you either love or hate because of his personality. I think he’s great – something completely different than what you’re used to seeing.
RAW vs JPEG
But the point of this post was to show off Jared’s RAW vs JPEG videos. There’s 9 of them, so sit back and learn why RAW is (for many) a better choice than JPEG, for your digital camera…
See ya!
I like the fro guy. Have seen his videos elsewhere.
There’s too many to watch here but I’ve shot both RAW and JPG. Raw is fun and certainly powerful.
But, you will soon tire of it: the file sizes, the conversion processes, all the editing. You will realize that in most cases the shot is interesting and good, no matter if it’s RAW or JPG and being RAW makes it no better.
It’s like the content thing.
Anyway, I shoot the highest rez of JPEG and can still sharpen images somewhat and adjust white balances.
Good enuff.
The conversion process is no biggie if you have the right software. Aperture 3 for Mac or Lightroom will easily import the RAW files and then when you need the jpeg’s, you just export them – with all your changes, really easy.
Not always it’s enough the shot is interesting. I recently took a picture of some people sitting in a couch in front of a big bright window. I had exposed for the people so everything _inside_ looked as it should, but the window was completely blown out, 255 all over the place. It ruined the shot. If I shot in JPEG, there was nothing to be done. But because I shot in RAW, I was actually able to recover a lot of data in that area and save the shot.
It just doesn’t make much sense to shoot pictures with $1000 equipment and have the camera process your RAW file in-camera in 1/50th of a second or whatever it does, and throw away so much data, when you can do it at your powerful home computer and retain _all_ the data. Storage these days are butt cheap, a 1TB Western Digital USB external drive will cost you $70 and hold about 70,000 RAW files – that should last for quite some time 🙂
Too lazy to watch the videos 🙁 Can you summarize what he says? lol
Basically, RAW rocks, JPG sucks – that’s more or less the point 🙂
LOL First of all, Jared do have a nice hair huh! And second, raw is really a good choice for pro photographer. Very flexible to use for other purposes.
I like RAW, but try taking 500 photos per day and going through the RAW processing procedures….even as “automated and easy” as you may think they are.
I know you can do amazing things with it. I’ve pulled decent photos out of blackness before, truly awesome.
But, I don’t need it. I not making errors like that on a daily basis.
And, content is king in blogs and photos. You can have the crappies grainy slightly blurry photo taken from a cell phone of the most interesting thing captured at the perfect time and it will be a great photo.
Or you can use $3k in equipment, shoot raw and take the most boring bland photos.
I’m not being argumentative, these are just my thoughts on it.
I’ve shot both, and a LOTS of them.
Everybody can – and should – use the format they feel is best for them, of course. Some just prefer to shoot pictures and don’t do post processing and then cry when that 1 out of a 1000 shot is ruined because it was shot in JPG and not RAW 🙂
Just FYI, you can easily apply presets to your RAW imports – so it’s basically processed (more or less) the same way as the camera does, except you still have the RAW file for when it’s needed. It’s like shooting RAW+JPG.
Correct, and it’s not as fast or straightforward as directly importing JPGs.
🙂