Wow. Rebel Fish finally solved the raw vs. JPEG question for herself, anyway. She’s been shooting raw becuase it’s been much faster in post-processing in Lightroom. She knows the quallity of JPEG in modern cameras is sweet, and few people can tell the difference in final outputs.

After Lightroom beta 4 came out, the speed of JPEG processing was snappy enough to warrant taking another look at JPEG shooting.

She tried an engagement session tonight to see how it would go.

She’s blown away by how limited her Lightroom editing is! All of her presets that she built in LR (that save her hours upon hours of editing) look like poo on JPEGs. The JPEG has a significantly limited range of what you can do to it compared to a raw image. Becuase you’re applying a white balance, sharpening, tone, contrast to the original image, when you bring it into LR, it’s like applying effects on top of existing effects. The result is crap. Trust Rebel Fish. Crap. You can’t push the saturation without seeing noise. You can’t jack up the contrast without banding.

She never would have put raw over JPEG in anything but speed before now, but seeing how limited a range of effects she can create in LR, She’s never shooting JPEG again.

JPEG shooters: you’re shooting yourself in the foot. The power of Lightroom or Aperture or Bridge lies in their ability to avoid you having to open images individually in Photoshop. You can get that sexy, surreal color. The cool desaturation effect. Cross-processed looks. Anyhing you like–all without having to open and edit the image, saving you hours upon hours. Because JPEG cripples the file, you can’t get some of the cool effects. It’s honestly like the difference between AM and FM: the JPEG doesn’t allow you the full range of frequency.

RF

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