Just a little over a year ago I was a jpeg shooter. I am a part time pro and have been doing it for a number of years. Most of my shots are well exposed and therefore the raw image does not give me a lot over the jpeg. I now like to have the option to use the raw. I now shoot only in raw. I batch process all images to jpeg. While reviewing the jpeg I may go back to a few raw images and convert myself. This gives me the best of both worlds.
Mark
Mark
I'm blushing :-) I feel as if I have a million miles to go but am enjoying the journey as I keep learning and trying to improve. By far composition is what I struggle with the most.
Steve - is he a former film shooter? This could be the answer.Originally Posted by Kayaker72
I'm certainly no pro, but I've been shooting in RAW+JPEG quite a bit lately as a new workflow experiment. I import all the JPEGs first, delete the garbage, and then import the matching RAW pairs for the shots I like and need to edit. I find the difference between the JPEG right out of the camera and the RAW image to be substantial in many cases - especially at ISO 1600 or greater. I can't imagine being stuck with just the JPEGs, but then again the chasm between my skill and experience and a pro is pretty big too!
Mark/clemmb- that sounds a very good work flow method and it would capture the best of both worlds.
Kingb- a similar workflow to Mark and yes the Pro is certainly a former film shooter. He uses a 5D and a 70-200 2.8, a 16-35mm, a 50/1.4 and a lensbaby(and some 580's). I am not sure what the second shooter uses. The big difference that I could see, was that he knew what he was doing, knew his equipment and communicated well to the clients. I was expecting an 85mm 1.2 or something more exotic. His gear was adequate and very well used, his Photoshop CS4 knowledge was very impressive and his experience was extensive.
It was a good day and I'm an enthusiastic sponge for this sort of information.
Steve U
Wine, Food and Photography Student and Connoisseur
I'm a rank amateur and I shoot RAW only. I use Bridge to review my images, then ACR and PS for processing. My goal for this year is to "get it right" in camera more often to reduce the post processing workload. We were in Vegas, Death Valley, and Valley of Fire last month and I came back with hundreds of images. I processed all the Vegas and Death Valley images and then ran out of steam halfway through the Valley of Fire images. I still have 50 or more to go.
Which leads me to another question along the post-processing lines; do most of you seriously cull your work to just a few of your best shots? I tend to not toss anything unless it's really unusable, but as I mentioned above, I end up with way too many pictures. But deciding which and how many to keep for my portfolio is tough.
I've started tossing more and more as my library has grown larger and larger.
I don't remember which book I took this from, but I think about my image library in terms of (1) photographs and (2) documentation of some person or event - which of course is a bunch of photos too, but they don't tend to be all that interesting. Tier 1 photos get a 3 to 5 star rating in Aperture, and they are the ones that I care about most. But tier 2 photos provide context, fond memories, etc, so they are worth keeping too so long as they are properly exposed and sufficiently sharp.
Then, I put only the best shots on my smugmug site. That forces me to think critically about the massive number of shots that I accumulate!
I shoot RAW only. It's a hobby for me, I have time to edit and convert. Still, I'm pretty brutal when I cull images, both for technical and compositional reasons. For each event/occurrence, I try to reduce it to the one shot that represents what I want to convey. The only time I keep a set of similar shots is when the sequence itself tells a story - daughter blowing out birthday candles, smiling, then shoving her hands in the cake and putting handfuls in her mouth, for example.
What do you do with the RAW files of images that you like and need no editing? Hopefully, you save those RAWs, too. I can almost gaurantee that someday you'll want to go back and improve one of those images, for a specific purpose or with some great technique you pick up later - and you'll kick yourself if you only saved the JPG.
This. I find myself going back to redo images quite often. Along with my photo skills, my Photoshop skills improve steadily. I went back through some images of Germany and Austria from our visit 2 years ago and made some serious improvements to some of those images, especially some noisy night shots.
Oops. I wasn't clear. I keep all the matching RAW files for any photo that I choose not to delete.
I archive the raw files. The only jpg I archive are the ones the customer ordered so I have a record of what they ordered.
I was a film shooter before I went digital. I found digital to be a learning curve. Digital is not as forgiving as film. I found I was not as good as I thought at capturing the images.
Mark
Mark
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