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[2223] Of another shot of Blackwattle Bay in raw mode

I have checked my visitor counter just now and boy, my daily average unique hit since June has dropped to below 100. The last time that happened was 2 years ago.

I could not help with the level of inactivity observed at this blog and at my column at The Malaysian Insider. There were so many things happening and I was at best grappling with them.

Now that I have time for myself, I have begun writing again for my column. I look to submit it by this Friday.

In the meantime, just to warm things up here and bump up my blog in your web reader, here is a filler: what else but a picture?

Some rights reserved. By Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams.

Again, this is at Blackwattle Bay. Shot in raw mode as well, just like the previous photo.

I like this photo because of the perspective it offers. Okay, that is a load of bullshit. I just needed an object of interest and this was the most obvious around.

Here is something that I recently discovered. When I shoot in raw mode, the size of individual file is large compared to jpeg format. That is expected. Once transferred to a terminal and saved as jpeg, the size becomes about just a third compared to one shot in jpeg.

Question: why? More importantly, does saving the raw photo as jpeg adversely affect the quality of the photo?

So far, I hardly notice the difference.

By Hafiz Noor Shams

For more about me, please read this.

3 replies on “[2223] Of another shot of Blackwattle Bay in raw mode”

Do you post-process the RAW file before converting it to JPEG? The advantage of RAW only becomes obvious if you make use of it in post-processing, otherwise the final picture would not be too different from the straight-out-of-camera JPEG. In fact if anything it would probably look worse than JPEG if you don’t do any adjustment, because with JPEG the camera usually processes its contrast, tonal range, saturation etc before outputting it, whereas RAW is a vanilla, relatively untouched version of the photo. There are a number of advantages of RAW over JPEG, the biggest ones are a better control over white balance, more details in the photos, and the ability to recover blown-out highlight and underexposed shadow details.

As for saving RAW into JPEG resulting in a smaller file size, it greatly depends on the setting you use in the saving process. I guess the default setting of the software you use is more aggressive in reducing the file size, and it may actually result in some loss in detail. Look up the settings of the software, and turn the detail setting higher. At its maximum setting, JPEG that comes from a processed RAW should have more details than a regular JPEG, not less (which often results in a similar or larger file size too).

I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom if you haven’t already used it. It’s one of the industrial standard software for RAW processing. If you are interested check out http://www.lightroomkillertips.com, and a good place to start is their preset posts (look up the preset category). It would wow you with how much you could do in very short time. :)

RAW format is the unprocessed/ minimally processed data from the camera sensor, which is why the file is so large. Jpeg is a lossy compression format for graphics, and as such it loses information when it is saved, in exchange for the far smaller file size.

A similar analogue would say, WAV and MP3 format for music files. MP3 format is lossy, and hence loses certain information deemed unimportant or unnoticeable to normal human to get that file size down.

Whether you can notice any difference would depend on how fine you look into it. Audiophiles can certainly distinguish between MP3 and uncompressed WAV. Similarly, professional photographer might notice the difference for RAW versus Jpeg.

For normal use though, high quality Jpeg is good enough, I guess.

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