RAW or Jpeg?

[hartcons]

Originally Posted by Jeff

Hartcons,
What are the in camera settings you use for your JPEG shots?

I think I'm running default settings at the moment on my e-300. I've played around a bit with the various settings (contrast, saturation, gradation, sharpness) but haven't stuck with any of the changes for long. It seems like it would be time-consuming to change these values for each shot (or shoot). To me one of the nice things about a d-slr is speed so I look for ways to avoid too much in-camera fiddling on a per-shot basis (and maybe raw could help with that).

One thing I've noticed about the e-300 is that it's more willing to over-expose (depending on your definition of that and personal taste) than the d70 which leads to brighter pictures but sometimes you might want to dial in some negative exposure compensation and then try to bring out shadow detail (if necessary) in post.

[fotobram]

I have been shooting RAW + JPEG when I started with the E300. The advantage of RAW was much more then I expected, so now I shoot RAW only.
On holiday I shoot RAW + a very small JPEG in order to be able to see the pictures on my Archos Gmini 400 too (nice toy, MP3 player and image tank).

[hartcons]

Originally Posted by th0t

Does your E-300 allow you to save custom settings like the E-1? If it does, you can save your most common camera setups so you can quickly switch settings in the field or at a shoot.

I don't think the e-300 supports this (but maybe this could eventually be added via a firmware update?). It does have a truckload of scene modes, however (the other night I used the Night mode for shoot lights reflected on a river). It also has things like candle mode and museum mode although I haven't tried them.

[hartcons]

Originally Posted by Pavel

Hartcons: because of the linear nature of digital sensors it is not a good idea to underexpose and bring up luminance in post. It is far preferable to do the oposite, expose as bright as you can without blowing what you need detail in and then dial it down in post. You will get better details in the lower quartertones and far less noise. It works doubly well using raw as you can often find more latitude. It's great to be able to pull back half to a full stop of "blown" highlights that are forever gone in jpgs plus if you want to you can extract the shot three or five times and combine them for more latitude that way.
Cheers.

During my limited .orf raw testing I found I was able to recover a blown sky somewhat using adobe camera raw (whereas Master couldn't do that). I think my d70 works really hard to preserve highlights but then the pictures can be dark and you have to push them in post to get something that is nice to look at. I'll have to try the approach you suggest since personally I prefer bright pictures.

[Paul Shields]

I've recently switched to 'RAW+jpg' as I miss the out of camera quality of the Oly jpeg engine, but still want more control if needed later in post. I think the number of shots on a 2GB card dropped from around 196 to 140, so not a big sacrifice in storage for a lot of extra flexibility.

[dc2]

Originally Posted by Paul

I've recently switched to 'RAW+jpg' as I miss the out of camera quality of the Oly jpeg engine, but still want more control if needed later in post. I think the number of shots on a 2GB card dropped from around 196 to 140, so not a big sacrifice in storage for a lot of extra flexibility.

On the 1ds2 I get around 109 raws on a 2GB card