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Originally Posted by ditto1958
Another "dumb" question: if you take a RAW image and convert it to jpeg in your computer to work with it, where does the advantage of RAW come from? I thought that the reason for RAW was that you would be using a "digital negative" where all of the information captured by the camera was preserved. What's the difference then between shooting a jpeg in the camera or converting it to a jpeg in the computer?
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Ran across this article on RAW this morning:
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdf...rawcapture.pdf
So it looks like "raw conversion" happens in-camera when you shoot JPEG vs. shooting RAW where you get to do it yourself using a program like adobe camera raw.
To me what would make a compelling argument for RAW is if someone could post side-by-side comparison images where they were shooting RAW+high-quality JPEG and they could show how manually doing the raw conversion produced a better result than what the camera did for the JPEG. Sometimes I'll start working on a RAW image and moving sliders around and it just all seems to go terribly wrong and I wind up with something I like less than the in-camera JPEG (especially when it comes to colors). Basically with RAW I guess you're saying that you think you can do better than the engineers who programmed the camera.
Is there likely to be a difference in quality between the raw conversion algorithms in the camera vs. those in software? So for example with my e-300 would olympus tend to use the same algorithms in-camera and in Olympus Master/Studio or with the external software programs can they use "better" algorithms because the in-camera algorithms have to work really fast? One thing I've noticed is that when I open an olympus raw in Olympus master it starts out looking like the in-camera JPEG which I find comforting and then I can tweak from there.
In terms of RAW being 12-bit and JPEG being 8-bit does this matter for printing? So if I print a 12-bit version of my image will that look better than an 8-bit version? Supposedly when you are doing regular photoshop manipulations to your images (levels and such) having the extra bits of data can help maintain high quality (you can avoid banding in your histogram) but if the output is JPEG eventually you are going back to 8 bits anyway (just like the in-camera JPEG). Is a computer monitor capable of showing you all 12 bits of data?
One point that stood out in the article is that if you shoot RAW you can potentially tap into future enhancements in raw development (i.e., you can re-develop your digital negative with improved software).
If you shoot RAW it looks like you'll never be bored because you'll be continually trying out new raw converters and forever fiddling with your images and reading up on raw conversion algorithms (such as demosaicing).
A companion PDF to the above article is here (raw capture, linear gamma and exposure):
http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf
Here's an article about the advantages of raw on the apple site (iphoto can do limited raw conversion now but not for olympus raw just yet):
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300879
(but personally I'm not sure I prefer the raw version, for instance the red ball seems to be bleeding, so maybe it's partly a matter of personal taste)