Commentary # 13 ~ Christmas 2007
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Shooting RAW and the First Thing I Opened this Christmas: Pandoras "E-mail" Box

Christmas 2007


- by Craig Wassel

We photographers are such an interesting breed. We can spend hours having friendly discussions about many photographic topics like travel, subject matter, genres, aspirations, etc. The moment we start discussing the tech side - look out. Suddenly many of us get very contentious. That's part of the reason I usually avoid broaching technical topics in these commentaries. Every so often I will break down and touch on the technical, and it is always so interesting to see how fast I get emails vehemently opposing what I wrote.

That's what I triggered in my December commentary "Resolutions and Backing Up Into the New Year" (link) when I noted my observation and opinion about lower noise in .tiff's exported from RAW as opposed to straight-from-the-camera jpeg's. What I ended up opening was my first box for Christmas - Pandora's "E-mail" box - as some in disagreement emailed me. At the almost certain risk of never digging myself out of this, I'll retort and even agree with some of the points they made.

First, someone said that the amount of noise we see when looking at pixels on screen at 100% magnification is greater than what we will see in print because screens are somewhere between 72 and 96 dpi and quality prints are usually between 240 and 300 dpi. Agreed. Next, someone else noted that it's tough to see the difference between a good .jpeg and a good .tiff until a print gets fairly large, and most shooters never print 12" x 18" or larger. I concede this, also.

What remains true, though, is that .jpg is a "lossy" format; each time one is opened, edited, and saved, some information is lost. If the file will never be printed large, the loss is less likely to be seen. TIFF's are a lossless format all the way through editing and re-saving, and for the bodies I shoot and for my established workflow, shooting RAW is the path to getting my images into .tiff's that have a 16 bit depth. I won't make large prints from the majority of my photos - I just want to know that the .tiff option is there for me if I do. It's a preference based on evaluating results.

What I will not concede is that I said that RAW is the only way for serious photographers to shoot. Nope. I never said it or even inferred it, and I never will. I also did not say that anyone's photograph is lacking just because it is a .jpeg, nor that any print is substandard if it was not created from a .tiff. Ultimately, the impact of a photograph on the viewer is the measure of its success. I have never looked at a print I admired and proceeded to interrogate the photographer to see if his file format and workflow met with my approval. If the print inspires me, than there is likely something I can learn from the photographer, not anything I can lecture him or her about. Further, I view photography as an artform (I will come back to this shortly and expand on it). We all know that no one looks at the same piece of art and sees or experiences the same thing.

I simply stated the difference I see between .tiff's and jpeg's. You may see something different, and doing your own side by side comparison using a situation where noise - and other things like tonal qualities and gradiation - come into play. If you are a photographer who places alot of attention on lens quality and the many factors that can influence image quality, then RAW to .tiff may be something you want to examine for yourself.

This question of shooting RAW is also often a matter of preference, but I also understand that it can also be a black and white (get it?) matter of practicality. If I was a sports photographer for a newspaper I would not shoot RAW. Card space and speed of delivery would be priority - not maintaining the lossless option. The same could be true for any shoot that results in hundreds or thousands of images. There have been times where I have flipped over to .jpeg for this very reason. But the majority of us - myself included - do not have such assigments on a regular basis.

From another email: links to a site or two that are highly critical of shooting RAW, and the "time" factor was mentioned. Yes, it takes extra time to export .tiff's from RAW files than it does to simply offload .jpeg's straight from cards. Since it's still faster than developing a roll of film or waiting for it to come back from the lab, I really don't have a complaint. Once I have offloaded the RAW files from my card(s), I preview them on screen, select the best of the lot, start a batch process to export them to whatever file format most suits their purpose, and go do something else for a few minutes. It's a multi-tasking world.

Yet another comment I received is that "amateurs" who aren't confident enough to get the shot right shoot RAW so they can "fix" it later. Well, amateur or not, I don't think I have ever been able to "save" a severely missed shot just because I shot it in RAW. That type of thinking seems to parallel people who view RAW converters, PhotoShop, and other image editors as "photo-fixers" (see my October 2007 commentary "Just Like Cracker Jacks" - link) rather than digital darkrooms. The only thing I have ever used the RAW process to "fix" is when I have been a little off on white balance, or decided that I wanted a color version of a RAW image I shot in black and white.

I could go on and on playing point-counterpoint on this RAW debate, but I am going to stop that right here and bring everything back around to the subject of photography as an artform as I said I would: If you are constantly going back and forth about the cons and arguable pros of shooting RAW or arguing with me in your head as you read this, you are are over-exersizing your left brain. Never allow your left brain to dominate or even equal to your right, because I assure you it is your right that gives you the ability to envision and produce photographs that you are proud of and that evoke inspiration.

Stop to consider this: have you ever heard painters stand around discussing the technical superiority of one brand of brush over another the way you have heard photographers debate the relative merits of lenses or other gear? Me neither. As artisans, painters have a distinct advantage over us photographers: the technological advances in horse hair over the past two thousand years or so have been minimal (please note the humor have it entered into the record). As I said, we photographers are an interesting breed. We are artisans, but ones that have very active left brains that have a voracious appetite for lens reviews and new camera bodies and specifications and measurements, and the era of digital camera marketing is feeding us well. We are gadget geeks.

Of course, my little commentary on my little corner of the web is not going to change this. Maybe it will at least ease some readers' ire.

May the muse of photography keep us, and protect us from our left brains :-)

"Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.."

~ Don McCullin ~








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" . . . As artisans, painters have a distinct advantage over us photographers: the technological advances in horse hair over the past two thousand years or so have been minimal (please note the humor have it entered into the record). As I said, we photographers are an interesting breed. We are artisans, but ones that have very active left brains that have a voracious appetite for lens reviews and new camera bodies and specifications and measurements, and the era of digital camera marketing is feeding us well . . ."



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