rscheffler
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 p.1 #10 · Do you shoot RAW or JPEG ? | |
lens_payoff_0l wrote:
I’m a casual photographer—mostly family, travel, and everyday moments. One thing I’ve noticed is how fantastic the Leica JPEGs look straight out of the camera.
A few questions:
* If you shoot JPEG, do you use Leica Looks in-camera or apply them afterward?
* If you shoot RAW, what’s your workflow?
* If you use Lightroom/Photoshop, do you see editing as part of the creative process, or do you prefer getting it right in-camera?
I sometimes feel the art is making the best image with the camera and available light rather than relying heavily on post-processing—but I’m curious how others view it.
* Where do you store your photos? I have 8 TB of iCloud, but it’s getting expensive. Thinking about moving to a home storage solution. What do you recommend?...Show more →
I transitioned to digital back around 2001 with the Canon 1D. That camera had 'quirky' in-camera color quality that by default tended to have a noticeable cyan color shift in a lot of situations and didn't really like the files straight out of the camera. The early SOOC jpegs also had primitive (in hindsight) processing applied in-camera, such as NR, that resulted in loss of image sharpness/detail compared to converting the same image from a RAW original. I actually bought some sort of profile or something from Fred Miranda back then to address the color issue. But due to these limitations, early on I decided to shoot RAW because it was the equivalent to a digital 'negative.' I.e. it was as close to the first generation of the image out of the camera as possible, comparable to how a negative (or color positive - slide film) was in the film era. The thinking being in part that post production software would improve and the biggest benefit would be reprocessing RAW files rather than jpegs or tiffs with baked-in color and tonal adjustments (kind of like trying to re-edit your images from a collection of prints rather than negatives). 25 years later and I can take those original 1D RAW files and run them through the current version of Lightroom (or equivalent) and benefit from the processing improvements that have been introduced since then (though unfortunately AI Denoise is still not able to resolve the shadow banding artifacts that were common in images from my 1D).
That all said, I also worked in prepress at a newspaper for over 10 years during the early digital era and quickly realized that SOOC jpegs were more than good enough for publication, albeit on newsprint, which was a very low bar when speaking about image quality. 
With my current cameras, jpeg output is technically very good and often barely distinguishable from RAW conversions from a sharpness/tonality perspective (if just doing a straight unedited RAW conversion). So I think if you like the SOOC color/look from a given camera, there's nothing wrong with using those images as they are. You just have to accept that that is how those images will look best and they will have less editing flexibility should your preferences change in the future. Which is another reason I continue to shoot RAW for almost everything other than immediate-use images with short lifespans for very specific clients. For sure, any personal work is in RAW in part for that future flexibility. Over those ~25 years of digital, my post processing style and preferences have definitely changed and while I won't revisit the vast majority of the images I have already processed, I can if I want to. Additionally, RAW lets me shoot a bit more 'loosely' without having to pay as much attention to camera settings/exposure/white balance, etc., because within reason all of that can be optimized in post.
So for me, yes, post processing is an integral part of the photographic process. Sometimes I shoot things a certain way in-camera because of what I expect to then do later in post production. But in general it just lets me have the flexibility to tune images to the way I want them to look without having to commit to that immediately in-camera.
As for image storage: after a project has been completed, it's moved off of redundant NVMe SSD 'working' drives to a bunch of bare hard drives that get rotated through a couple tray-less multi-bay hard drive towers as local 'cold' storage. I also upload edited jpegs to various cloud locations, such as Google Drive/Photos for distribution or sharing, as well some are archived on Amazon AWS. You have to be careful about cloud backups other than consumer ones like iCloud or Google because while the cost to upload and store your files might be relatively inexpensive, if you have to do a massive multi-TB download of an archive, you can run into considerable bandwidth costs. Therefore IMO cloud is a good remote emergency option for recovering small numbers of files, such as if you accidentally deleted a folder of prized photos on a hard drive, rather than as a solution to recover your entire photographic archive, even though your entire archive might also be up in the cloud. Multiple backups across hard drives is probably still the best compromise between cost and convenience, even though storage prices have massively increased over the past year.
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