For some sports events I do shoot RAW+JPEG where I have to submit images right after the event, with JPEG this is much easier to do. However, once the RAWs are processed then the original JPEGs get deleted. No matter how cheap HDDs are, I only keep what I need to keep. For my master files, the RAW is kept and a L JPEG, for some work I will keep a TIFF as well but since most of my work is sports and motorsport, I rarely work with layers.
Shaun Cox wrote:
I've never understood why folks shoot RAW + JPG.
I always shoot RAW but sometime I add a small/medium JPG in addition. When I am at extended family gatherings I am traveling and rarely carry a laptop, so it's just easier to be able to dump the JPG files off the card and one of those "1-hour" (oxymoron since they seems to always take longer then an hour) camera places. I have a HD80, so all the cards are saved there for my use later (when I delete any JPG created from the camera and then gen what I want from the RAW's).
The other time (rarely) when I am in a B&W mood, I find it easier to enable RAW+small JPG and change the JPG to B&W in camera.... the chimping is easier for me if I see B&W rather then colour & the camera will show the B&W even though obviously you can get colour or B&W from the RAW file.
I shoot RAW, unless I need the speed of jpeg writing shooting burst (it's a 20D - a bit slow!). I weed the RAWs after I shoot and get rid of the out of focus, exposed beyond redemption etc. Then I keyword in Bridge. Then I process the ones that I am keeping for personal use and save the jpegs (into iphoto which is as complicated a program as the husband and kids can deal with making prints and slideshows in!).
For any I use for microstock (which I tend to process differently and are a very tiny percentage of images) I save both layered PSD or Tiff files and a full resolution jpeg. So I will have a large set of RAWs with matching jpegs, plus for some files I also have tiffs or PSDs. plus some RAW files that I've kept because I think I might come back to them. All keyworded in Bridge according to subject and file status (well that's the theory - I'm not quite as rigorous about keywording as I might be...!)
After six months I come back and revisit the files I've kept, and delete RAW files I haven't got to processing, and weed out jpegs and matching RAWs where I only wanted them temporarily. (Does Aunt Jemima want this one of little Jethro ?- no, good, I'll delete it then...) After another year I'll do the same, only keeping the most interesting files that I find I still want to see.
As a result I've reduced nearly six years of digital phtography down to about 5,600 edited jpegs with matching RAW (or for early files original jpegs), which is both storable and manageable. Backed up on an external drive plus DVDs of the RAW files plus DVDs of the iphoto library - the equivalent of the family album - kept off site.
My big management headache isn't the digital files, it's digitising the archive of twenty five years of film. A real pain as you have to add all the data by hand to each batch of files. And scans are huge, and it's always a quandary what size to keep them as it take so long to rescan at high resolution. At the moment I'm keeping both hig resolution scanned tiffs plus edited and resized jpegs as I really haven't got a handle on processing scans yet - the files react to things like exposure changes and sharpening totally differently to DSLR files and I haven't quite worked it out yet! Hopefully when I have a better handle on what I am doing I can just save final jpegs.
I edit my RAWs, keep good RAWs, keep layered tiffs now (used to keep psds). I keep a year per external harddrive and back that up on a 1TB drive. I'm now using Lightroom and have over 7 years of digital files archived, most keyworded (prior to LR, I used Imatch).
