I’ve always read online and in magazines about the strengths of shooting in RAW mode. However, I’ve never seen a noticeable increase in quality when I had done it in the past, and the extra time it takes to process them didn’t seem worth the effort. Now that I have started dabbling a bit more with HDR, I thought I’d do a direct comparison… I shot in RAW+ mode on my Pentax K10d, which basically means that each image taken stores both a RAW (DNG) and JPG. I shot with my Sigma 15mm fisheye on a tripod using a remote and used the exact same tonemapping (in Photomatix) and layers (in Photoshop CS3) on both composite images. Here are the results…
Above is the RAW HDR image of the pepper, below is the JPG. Clicking on them will take you to the full-size image for each.
OK, so what’s the verdict? A 100% crop of the above images shows us that the RAW image is noticeably better at handling contrast and colours, and the image is also sharper. Look at how the small droplets of water are handled at the bottom of the crop – completely blown out on the JPG!
Again, we have the RAW image above and the JPG below.
That’s a pretty conclusive comparison. I’ll have to give this a shot myself later.
Love it! :*
I shoot RAW for everything. If you have to make a plain part of a jpg two stops lighter or darker you’ll see banding. Or just an image that’s trally off is more recoverable. Think of it as MP3 vs CD.
Jeff
Yeah, after this test, I’ve switched over to shooting in RAW+ mode, then deleting either the jpg or RAW images afterwards, depending on what I want them for. I’m starting to strongly lean towards just shooting in RAW nowadays. The only thing holding me back is the thought of having to convert a lot of RAW images to jpeg if I’ve taken a lot of “social” pics that will only be going on Facebook.
I look forward to the day when I can get a 256GB memory card for only $20, and I will laugh that I didn’t shoot RAW as much because of file size and write speed limitations.