Newbie Raw Question

[ditto1958]

John, what do you use to comvert and process your images?

[hartcons]

Originally Posted by JohnC

I don't know if I still have the images, but last summer I did a small test of shooting a Macbeth color chart with RAW and JPG and the difference was quite startling. The dark brown patch on the card did not record anywhere near its real color with JPG, but was right on with RAW. There were other colors that didn't match, but that one stood out a lot.

Interesting. Could this have been a color space difference? sRGB vs. Adobe RGB? Was the improvement in the brown patch maintained once you processed the RAW and saved out as an 8-bit JPEG? Did you try printing to see if the color improvement was maintained across printing?

Assuming that your final output is an 8-bit JPEG then the question I have is whether shooting RAW provides any inherent quality advantage vs. just letting the camera make the jpeg and then tweaking as needed in photoshop (say with Levels or S/H). I guess it depends in part on how well you nailed the white balance and exposure with the in-camera JPEG. But I don't think even RAW will save you if the focus point was imprecise or you got camera shake or you dialed up the wrong amount of DOF.

[JohnC]

I'm using Adobe Camera Raw. My notebook has CS1 and my desktop has CS2.

I'm going to have to repeat the experiment with the color checker. As I remember it, the converted JPG looked better than the original JPG, but it has been just over a year.

John