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Hi all.
I’ve had a canon EOS350D for about a year now, and up until a month ago I always used high quality JPEGs for my images. I’ve recently gone the way of the raw file and will never look back.
I’d be interested in what went into this decision. Do you have a specific image that you believe does better starting from raw than high quality jpeg, or were you persuaded by someone’s discussion of the topic?
I use photoshop CS2 to convert my images to JPEG – normally not even opening them into Photochop, just using the import plugin and saving to JPEG.
It’s not clear that this is giving you an advantage over using jpeg from the start.
I have been investigating the use of PNG files and think that I should be using these instead of JPEGs to preserve detail in my photos.
Png is a lossless format, and there are situaitons – medical images for example – where this is crucial. With few exceptions high quality jpeg is adequate, though I would recommend against editing and resaving a chain of jpegs.
Unfortunately to convert an image to png in photoshop, I either have to export as a TIFF (45MB) and then batch convert to PNG or open into photoshop and then save as a PNG. Both ways lose the EXIF data and are slow (not to mention the TIFF way requires a temp folder of 5GB for the contents of a 1GB card full of raw files).
This should give you an indication of how many other people use this workflow: very few indeed.
Is PNG the way I should be going or is there a better format I should use?
Most people use PSD or TIFF files for lossless storage.
If PNG is the best way to go, is there some other way of converting from CR2 to PNG? Bear in mind for 99% of my photos, all I adjust is the exposure, brightness and white balance before I save them (and Gasp! Delete the CR2)
The CR2 is your digital negative, and I recommend that you keep it in preference even to your edited files. Raw files are smaller than the corresponding TIFF or PSD file, and since raw processing is an evolving art you may be able to get a better image from your files in the future.
That said, there is nothing wrong with using high quality jpeg as your main format. There is much more to getting good images than simply adjusting exposure and color temp. I would also recommend that you delve more deeply into editing your images with – what else – curves!
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Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/