"Pro" portrait photographers - JPEG or RAW?
Discussion
Over the last year we've had a series of photos taken by a "pro" photographer. I put the pro in quotes, as I'm a little unsure on how well he's taken to the digital age.
If I remember right, he's using a Canon DSLR (can't remember which, just remember seeing the Canon logo). Don't know why its come to mind now, but I've realised that when we went through the previews to decide which pics to have printed, everything was in JPEG format.
Which strikes me as being totally wrong - surely its normal for a pro portrait photographer to work in RAW, especially if they're trying to sell relatively large pictures - you don't want anything lost in post-processing if you're going to be taking pictures up to say A3?
Or am I completely wrong and barking mad?
If I remember right, he's using a Canon DSLR (can't remember which, just remember seeing the Canon logo). Don't know why its come to mind now, but I've realised that when we went through the previews to decide which pics to have printed, everything was in JPEG format.
Which strikes me as being totally wrong - surely its normal for a pro portrait photographer to work in RAW, especially if they're trying to sell relatively large pictures - you don't want anything lost in post-processing if you're going to be taking pictures up to say A3?
Or am I completely wrong and barking mad?
No need for him to shoot RAW at all. There would be no noticable difference in resolution when printed, it just allows more control in post processing which he obviously doesn't need/want. He probably also wants to keep his data storage requirements low if he's shooting portraits all day.
There was a great thread about this a while ago with some very heated discussion
There was a great thread about this a while ago with some very heated discussion
SamHH said:
Does he get the results his customers want? If so, what's the problem?
Another thought is that maybe he recorded RAW and JPG versions of his photos and was showing you the JPGs to speed things up.
I did wonder about that, and whilst it seems possible, something about the guy struck me that its unlikely.Another thought is that maybe he recorded RAW and JPG versions of his photos and was showing you the JPGs to speed things up.
And as for my being happy about the pictures, on the whole, I'm not that happy with them - on some of the better ones I feel that they're spoilt by being slightly out of focus, although maybe that was intentional.
But then its my partner paying for them, and she's happy.
Personally I'd go for RAW if I was doing something like this - storage isn't particularly expensive these days (hasn't been for quite a while), and I'd want to give my customers the best potential image quality.
nick_bbb said:
No need for him to shoot RAW at all. There would be no noticable difference in resolution when printed, it just allows more control in post processing which he obviously doesn't need/want. He probably also wants to keep his data storage requirements low if he's shooting portraits all day.
There was a great thread about this a while ago with some very heated discussion
Storage is cheap though - 1Tb drives are now well under £100, aren't they?There was a great thread about this a while ago with some very heated discussion
Depends on the level of compression used in JPEG, but even knowing that I was using a lossy algorithm would make me shy away from it for professional usage.
I agree that you can get some extremely good quality from JPEG, and to be honest I haven't bothered using RAW on my DSLR (yet), and have had some stunning prints up to A4.
No wonder its a heated argument though, you can't really say which side is correct.
clonmult said:
No wonder its a heated argument though, you can't really say which side is correct.
The thread I was talking about started from the exact opposite point of view to you. Pro photographers don't need RAW as they get the shot right in the camera. RAW is just for people who aren't confident with thier work. Persoanlly I use both. If I'm shooting a car feature for a magazine or a model I need the safety net of RAW as it has saved my ass before. If I'm at a car show/drag racing and shooting all day I will shoot JEPG as it takes too long to go through all the RAW files.
clonmult said:
And as for my being happy about the pictures, on the whole, I'm not that happy with them - on some of the better ones I feel that they're spoilt by being slightly out of focus, although maybe that was intentional.
If a photograph is out of focus, then the format it was taken in is immaterial - it will always be out of focus.andy-xr said:
Quite probable that the jpegs you've seen are resized proofs of the originals in whatever format he/she shot them in. Everyone can view jpegs, not everyone can view RAW files and the photographer may not want to give access to hi res originals at proof stage
Exactly - I always shoot raw, but give jpeg previews to clients.tog said:
andy-xr said:
Quite probable that the jpegs you've seen are resized proofs of the originals in whatever format he/she shot them in. Everyone can view jpegs, not everyone can view RAW files and the photographer may not want to give access to hi res originals at proof stage
Exactly - I always shoot raw, but give jpeg previews to clients.So the photographer in the OP is either an amateur for shooting JPG, or an excellent professional for shooting JPG
.jon- said:
You would never supply RAW to the customer as you'll have codec issues with anyone who hasn't got that camera.
The pictures weren't supplied to us - we went to his studio to go through and choose which ones were good enough for printing.Maybe I'm misunderstanding the RAW format - its the "original" image, uncompressed, and (relatively?) unprocessed.
JPEG will always drop some information here or there, and it just strikes me as being wrong to use at the pro level (unless you happen to be able to make use of some compression artifacts).
Would it be similar to a sound engineer purely working in MP3 as opposed to a WAV/uncompressed format?
clonmult said:
jon- said:
You would never supply RAW to the customer as you'll have codec issues with anyone who hasn't got that camera.
The pictures weren't supplied to us - we went to his studio to go through and choose which ones were good enough for printing.Maybe I'm misunderstanding the RAW format - its the "original" image, uncompressed, and (relatively?) unprocessed.
JPEG will always drop some information here or there, and it just strikes me as being wrong to use at the pro level (unless you happen to be able to make use of some compression artifacts).
Would it be similar to a sound engineer purely working in MP3 as opposed to a WAV/uncompressed format?
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