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p.3 #4 · p.3 #4 · A Bird Photographer's 5D III vs. 1D IV high ISO comparison | |
arbitrage wrote:
I agree with Peter on this one. I respect Arash for his amazing work and competency in bird photography but that statement is absolutely not true. I always shoot RAW as half my fun is post-processing. But there is no way one can logically argue that competency in wildlife photography has any correlation with the type of file one shoots. Peter's statement is a valid argument. Arash's is not. End of
I have to disagree with you. A competent photographer strives to maximize output quality in his photographs, If you ever take a workshop with Arthur Morris, Doug Brown or others the first thing they teach you is to set your camera to RAW mode. If a photographer doesn't understand the advantages of RAW format they should go back to digital basics. IMO they are not competent yet. Shooting in RAW is not for having fun in post processing but for getting the best output possible. Who likes to waste their time on the computer anyway?
Competency is only proven by one's images and their track record, not their word of mouth. For example look at Kiran's(kirry007) great images on his website above, he is a competent wildlife photographer IMO and stated his opinion about RAW as well. Unfortunately as Artie says there are many "internet experts" around on these forums, so the signal to noise ratio is very low.
Advantages of RAW format for people who don't know:
Higher image quality. Because all the calculations (such as applying gamma correction, demosaicing, white balance, brightness, contrast, etc...) used to generate pixel values (in RGB format for most images) are performed in one step on the base data, the resultant pixel values will be more accurate and exhibit less posterization.
Bypassing of undesired steps in the camera's processing, including sharpening and noise reduction
JPEG images are typically saved using a lossy compression format (though a lossless JPEG compression is now available). Raw formats are typically either uncompressed or use lossless compression, so the maximum amount of image detail is always kept within the raw file.
Finer control. Raw conversion software allows users to manipulate more parameters (such as lightness, white balance, hue, saturation, etc...) and do so with greater variability. For example, the white point can be set to any value, not just discrete preset values like "daylight" or "incandescent". As well, the user can typically see a preview while adjusting these parameters.
Camera raw files have 12 or 14 bits of intensity information, not the gamma-compressed 8 bits stored in JPEG files (and typically stored in processed TIFF files); since the data is not yet rendered and clipped to a colour space gamut, more precision may be available in highlights, shadows, and saturated colours. The colour space can be set to whatever is desired.
Different demosaicing algorithms can be used, not just the one coded into the camera.
The contents of raw files include more information, and potentially higher quality, than the converted results, in which the rendering parameters are fixed, the colour gamut is clipped, and there may be quantization and compression artifacts.
Large transformations of the data, such as increasing the exposure of a dramatically under-exposed photo, result in fewer visible artifacts when done from raw data than when done from already rendered image files. Raw data leave more scope for both corrections and artistic manipulations, without resulting in images with visible flaws such as posterization.
All the changes made on a RAW image file are non-destructive; that is, only the metadata that controls the rendering is changed to make different output versions, leaving the original data unchanged.
To some extent, RAW photography eliminates the need to use the HDRI technique, allowing a much better control over the mapping of the scene intensity range into the output tonal range, compared to the process of automatically mapping to JPEG or other 8-bit representation.
I hope this helps, and if you don't agree it's best to move on, this was not the topic of the discussion.
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