[andrew markworthy]

This is purely a matter of curiosity, but how many of you good people think that ability to take RAW images is an essential feature of a digital camera?

The question is spurred by my being given a Canon Powershot G7 by my father (basically, he's an old school photographer and after a brief foray into digital is going back to old fashioned film). I was reading reviews of the G7 and the big grouse about is that it has dropped the RAW facility that the G6 had. Now I can understand that a professional photographer might need this facility, but for an average or even fairly serious amateur, how often is RAW really needed?

Sorry, this isn't meant to sound confrontational, I'm genuinely curious.

[JohnRice]

At first I used Raw for anything important or that was going into a magazine. I did that for some time mainly because I was uncomfortable with using any compressed format. Up until that time, I never used any kind of compression until it was absolutely necessary. After a few years, I started shooting at the highest level (lowest compression) jpg and then when I get them in the computer, if I do any manipulation the first thing I do is convert them from sRGB to RGB and save as a TIFF, so there is no further compression. Even on full bleed magazine ads I have never seen any visible compression artifacts. It is just convenient to get significantly more shots on a card and faster writing. When the image is only compressed the one time, it seems to work great.

[Scott Merryfield]

I've been mainly using JPEG at it's highest quality (i.e. lowest compression) setting, both on my current Canon dSLR and my previous Canon Powershot G2 point & shoot. I've experimented with RAW just a little, but I'm not real comfortable doing a lot of post processing in Photoshop -- I only own PS Elements, and have mainly used it to clean up red eye and remove sensor/lens spots.

The thought of spending a lot of time processing RAW files after a vacation just does not excite me, either. When we return from a vacation, I may have as many as 1,000 photos to sort through. I'm just an amateur, so I'm not trying to make any income from my pictures, and I've been pleased with the results from jpeg. There are times where I'll struggle with exposure and RAW may have helped, but usually I can recognize those situations and will take a few shots at different exposures to hopefully get one that's acceptable. With digital, there's no cost in bracketing exposures (just storage space on your memory cards).

[Rob Gillespie]

Raw - as long as you understand how to convert it properly - can really save your bacon, especially when the venue has mixed lighting and the white balance is hard to nail properly. Raw files also have greater colour bit depth and allow all post processing - including sharpening - to be amended or even removed later, rather than locked into the file and fiddled with. It also allows a bit more detail to be recovered from 'blown' highlights. It's good for wedding photography due to the inordinate number of factors that you cannot control on the day but even many pros don't use it (their inherent skill with the camera renders much of raw's superiority moot).

For snapshots it's overkill. In fact it's overkill on anything you're not really prepared to put a lot of time into as it does add that extra layer of post processing which you may or may not be prepared to deal with. The finer control you have with raw virtually necessitates calibrated monitors and colour-profiled printing, none of which the casual shooter is going to use. It also means more memory cards and greater storage capacity on your PC.

I used to have the G5 and I liked the raw facility on it. Canon have dropped raw on that level of camera as price-wise they're nearly encroaching on DSLR territory which long-term are more profitible for them.

If you're the kind of photographer that takes the pic and prints, raw isn't for you. If you fiddle with it to get it 'just so' then it's worth the extra hassle IMO.

[JohnRice]

To continue from Rob's comments, for me the additional bit depth would be the real reason to go RAW, and maybe to squeeze out the last millimeter of enlargement. Still, when I shoot, it is typically under controlled situations and I have carefully done the lighting. Since I've been doing this for longer than I wish I had and I have finally gotten the feel for how these stupid digital sensors (mis)behave, unless I screw something up, I don;t need the extra bit depth. Of course, as Rob said, if you do screw up, RAW can give you just enough to save yourself, or at least not look like quite as much of a screw-up. The stickler is, you have to know what you did wrong and what to do about it.

[Phil Kim]

I shoot exclusively in RAW. With Apple Aperture or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's almost as effortless as JPEG. Mainly, I use it because it's much better at fixing underexposure or overexposure. White balance is another huge plus, as with 12-bit color depth (for potential HDR conversion) and lossless editing (converting JPEG to TIFF is tedious for me).

[andrew markworthy]

Interesting comments, guys, and thank you. I'm v. much a 'happy snaps' photographer, so for me, anything but a basic point and shoot facility is wasted. I occasionally have to take photos for publication/teaching purposes, but they're pretty much providing photographic evidence rather than being aesthetic [to explain - I occasionally need to take photos of people with unusual postures through brain damage, but so long as the picture is balanced, quality isn't a big deal, and reasonable jpegs are fine - at least the publisher and students have never complained ]. I'll use the G7 for this as it's better than my (latest model) Cybershot for picture quality, but for most vacation snaps I'll probably stick with the Cybershot as it's far more portable.

Sorry to sound a complete heathen. I can sense the body of my late uncle turning in his grave - he was a lighting designer and professional photographer and I suspect he wouldn't like the thought of his only nephew being so blase about photography.

[Man-Fai Wong]

I'd add one more thing. RAW shouldn't only be looked at as some sort of contingency plan for corrections, but given the limited DR (dynamic range) of digital, often, you find that the scene you shoot demands greater DR than what the in-camera settings and processing allow. Sure, there are techniques for squeezing the scene's DR into what the in-camera processing provides, but sometimes, it works better to have the extra bit depth of RAW preserved for later "massaging" in postprocessing where control over the processing is much greater. For instance, you generally cannot easily get the in-camera processing to produce results "just so" that you could otherwise achieve even w/ a simple custom tone curve either during RAW processing or post-RAW in 16-bit format -- well, at least not yet w/ the cameras available today unless you shoot tethered to a laptop or similar. And RAW processing software can (and do) continue to improve over time too.

But yeah, these issues generally won't matter to the average snapshooter nor will they always matter to the serious amateurs or even many pros.

FWIW, I usually shoot RAW+JPEG w/ low contrast, low sharpening settings on my Nikon D200 -- low contrast helps me get a better indication of exposure (and use of DR) when checking histogram and such, but the JPEG typically ends up needing a quick contrast tweak before output (and it'd be better to apply some final sharpening after that, instead of before). Most times I just use the normal quality JPEG (w/ a quick contrast and sharpening tweak) for quick small prints and the web, if the shots are in good light at reasonably low ISO. But when something matters more or are shot in difficult light and/or high ISO, I will typically work on it in RAW. And RAW processing need not always be very time consuming. You just need to have a good strategy/workflow to help streamline certain aspects of it for most images -- and often, the batch processing facilities provided by good RAW software will help there. In many cases, it would help a lot to plan ahead and shoot w/ full intention to process the RAW. For instance, wedding photogs typically shoot a white/gray card for reference in each lighting situation to be used for streamlined WB setting in RAW processing later (using whatever batch facilities), and such things can be done for various settings too, not just WB.

_Man_

[Sam Posten]

!00% Raw Canon CR2s and edited in Lightroom now that RSP got killed off. Lr is improving but I miss RawShooter!