Shooting in RAW is far superior than shooting in JPEG. I am going to be discussing with you the differences between using RAW and JPEG file formats when it comes to retouching photographs.
The RAW file format is digital photography’s equivalent of a negative in film photography. There is no industry standard RAW mode. Each camera manufacturer has it’s own proprietary format. For example Canon have CRW or more recently CR2, Nikon have NEF.
You may also notice that when you download your camera RAW files to your hard drive that additional files called ‘XMP’ are also included. These files store the metadata for the RAW image (keywords, caption, date, etc.) as well the edits you’ve made in Adobe Camera RAW (or equivalent program) on an image. If you discard it, you’ll lose that information.
RAW data is the output from each of the original red, green and blue sensitive pixels of the image sensor. RAW data from most high-end digital cameras contains 12 bit data, which means that there can be 4096 different intensity levels for each pixel.
If the data is stored as a JPEG file, it is modified by in camera set parameters such as white balance, saturation, sharpness, contrast etc, it is subject to JPEG compression and then stored on the memory card like this. In an 8-bit file (such as a JPEG), each pixel can have one of 256 different intensity levels.
Actually, 256 levels is enough, and all printing is done at the 8 bit level, so you might ask what the point is of having 12 bit data. The answer is that it allows you to perform a greater range of manipulation to the image without degrading the quality. You can adjust curves and levels to a greater extent, then convert back to 8-bit data for printing. If you want to access all 12 bits of the original RAW file, you can convert to a 16-bit PSD or TIFF file.
Dynamic range refers to the range of light to dark that can be captured by a camera before becoming completely white or black, respectively.
TIFF files are larger than JPEG files, but they retain the full quality of the image. They can be compressed or uncompressed, but the compression scheme is lossless, meaning that although the file gets a little smaller, no information is lost. Every time you modify and re-save a JPEG image, it loses more data.
The only advantage of saving JPEG data is that the file size is smaller and the file can be directly read by many programs or even sent directly to a printer. The disadvantage is that there is a quality loss; the amount of loss depending on how much compression is used. The more compression, the smaller the file but the lower the image quality.
When I am shooting, I have a custom picture style set on my DSLR.
Ideally you want to reduce the sharpness and contrast that is within the camera settings, you want to be able to work on an image with the highest dynamic range possible, so that when it comes to post-production and you are pushing your creative effects to a more extreme level, you are going to greatly reduce the amount of artifacts on your final image.
Shooing with a Flat picture style is what I use. This is also recommended for when you are shooting video on a DSLR. You do not want to go Super Flat or push it too far, otherwise you will find that the range of your mid-tones when post-processing will become very messy.
Your settings should be as follows:
There are various other picture styles within the camera, with the general aim of reducing your sharpness and contrast for different lighting situations. As long as you have your correct exposure and white balance set (definitely do a custom white balance, not the presets) you will be set. You should have your colour profile set to Adobe RGB and your exposure and white balance should be manually measured with a light meter and a white/grey card.
Example of “Flat” picture style on a still photograph:
Note the broad range of shadow and highlight detail across the image.
After adding contrast and sharpening in Lightroom:
Merely brightening or darkening a JPEG file; both in dynamic range and in the smoothness of tones, could not achieve similar results.
The RAW file format uses a lossless compression, and so it does not suffer from the compression artifact visible with “lossy” JPEG compression. RAW files contain more information and achieve better compression than TIFF, but without the compression artifact of JPEG.
I will be writing another post as a continuation of this on how to prepare your images for post-production and printing.
