file format

Always.

That said, my brother is going on holiday to America for 4 nights, with his 30D, 17-40 L, 8GB card and laptop; As always, he'll be shooting in JPG for reasons beyond my comprehension.
 
never have personally. tbh i cant see any great need to.

depends how much post processing you want to do. and how good you are at getting your metering/WB sorted in the first place.
 
The age old argument of RAW vs JPEG.
Personally I shoot jepg mainly because its more convenient, to just upload jpegs, rather than having to go through a lot of covnerting from raw just to edit them.

Ive read that some people shoot RAW indoors and jpeg outdoors, becuase indoors is more likely to need a white balance change and RAW can do that non desctructively.
 
I shoot in RAW+jpeg. I've got a 4gig memory stick in the camera and 2 more in the bag. Since getting the 450D I'm yet to take enough photos in one day to even half fill a card despite each imagine between both formats coming in at up to 20mb.
In shooting both I've got the quick and easy approach, aswel as the option for going deeper with post processing.
 
well iirc pro sports photographers shoot JPG to clear buffers quicker etc so it cant be bad.

you can still process JPG, just dont **** up your lighting.
 
I personally shoot raw exclusively except for event photography where I need to be able to print quickly, where I will be shooting raw to my compact flash and a small jpg to the sd card (by small, i mean a small from a 1DSmk3 which is still about 12 bloody megapixels :p)

The amount of latitude available in raw (exposure / colour) is just gobsmacking compared to jpg, and the amount of detail that is extractable makes it all worth it. It does create sizeable files, my 16gb cf card holds less than 550 raw files :/

Tom.
 
always raw. only problem is, panasonic's RW2 raw format isn't natively supported by Lightroom or Camera Raw yet, so I usually end up converting them to DNG before processing - 4GB Raw suddenly turns to 8GB DNG :/

I wish Adobe and Panasonic would just shake hands and sort the native Lightroom support out!
 
I only use JPEG on the A570 only because I have no option to use anything else :p

RAW on the 40D and nothing else though regardless of the use of the image!
 
well iirc pro sports photographers shoot JPG to clear buffers quicker etc so it cant be bad.

Completely true but keep in mind in that world it is a case of getting the photos onto the wire as quick as possible rather than producing the best photo.

I also only shoot RAW and believe it's down to what you do with the photos that makes the decision.

If you always shoot in good light, get your exposure correct, get your WB correct and only post the results on the internet at a relatively small 800x600 then JPEG would do fine.

If you shoot in 'challenging conditions' where you need to recover the image then RAW is great. Especially since tools are getting better and you can revisit the RAW file and reprocess it. The other factor is when you need to take your pictures and use them to print something that will really push the limits on the image (A2 or larger etc) and / or you need it in CMYK colour space then RAW makes more sense.
 
I'd say RAW for creative shoots, jpeg for the casual "bring your camera along" days. Even when you're creative with casual shots of friends and family, I couldn't justify the time spent on post-processing anyway besides a quick crop.

I would agree that RAW's really good at rescuing pictures. Take this shot, it was severly under-exposed (my friend grabbed the camera and dropped the ISO without realising I had it on Manual) and I wouldn't have been able to rescue it as well with jpeg.

The other really cool thing you can do with RAW is correcting Chromatic Abbration (sp?); Vignetting and stuff like that. So if you've found the perfect shot on a cheap lens that suffers from those problems, shoot it in RAW and you can treat yourself to a nice result.
 
Back
Top Bottom