Gochugogi wrote:
Recently, I've been editing old RAW files from a couple decades plus ago—6D, 20D and 5D—and colors are very good once processed, JPEGs, not so much. Dynamic range and noise is terrible compared to modern cameras so no shadow lifts and most blown highlights that can't be recovered. I didn't dare go past ISO 800 as noise looked like river pebbles. Canon's RAW converter from 2003 was almost useless and results were horrid. All it could do was convert from RAW to TIFF or JPEG. Took lots of time in Photoshop to make those images presentable. Now those old RAW images really shine in LR with a couple minutes of clicks and strokes. Glad I didn't toss those files.
Yes, I have been doing the same, and have been having fun treating old favorites from my 6 MP camera bodies to modern AI noise reduction and super sampling.
I fortunately never shot JPEG exclusively at the expense of RAW. However, I have to kick myself for having shot a number of projects (including some professional gigs) using Canon's mRAW format. This must have seemed like a space-saving life hack to me at the time, but these files are not nearly so malleable in post.
For those who don't know (or don't remember) what mRAW and sRAW were, these were "medium" and "small" RAW files that were downsampled to lower resolutions after being demosaiced and encoded to a linear format. (This is similar to how CLog compares to RAW in video encoding.) This was meant to mirror the same feature that JPEGs offered where you could choose large, medium, and small file sizes.
Canon has basically dropped this on new cameras and today we only get full resolution RAW captures in either uncompressed or compressed formats.
Mar 30, 2026 at 04:09 PM
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