UKH

For info, i normally use Photos on my iMac to edit my jpegs. And am just starting to experiment with CaptureOne for my RAW files.

I understand that as I edit my jpegs, they degrade. However Photos has the option to ‘Revert’ to the original. Does this mean the ‘deleted’ data is never properly deleted, it’s merely hidden?

My understanding is that RAW always allows you to revert to your original image. So how does this differ from my JPEGs as above. I thought one advantage of RAW was that you can always return to the original, whereas with jpeg you can’t? But that flies in the face of what I think Photos can do with JPEGs on my iMac?

Hope my question makes sense. And that someone can help, even with just a straightforward link.

TIA Graeme 

Photos layers the changes no matter what format the original is in so you can always revert back.

Thanks. So it’s essentially also a non-destructive editing tool?

A Raw image is essentially totally unedited, that includes the sharpening, type of light, colours etc. A Jpeg will have been edited in camera and will not allow you to change the settings or recover under or over exposed areas too much even if you do open a Jpeg in RAW.

Even if you are currently nor using RAW I'd take images in both formats so when you end up seeing the light and taking photos as a RAW file you can always go back and re-edit what you have taken. There is a noticeable difference once you get your head around it.

Although a bit more long winded, if you have enough disk space and don't mind the faff I would use RAW every time. I would not trust Apple not to further dumb down Photos as an application or not to have some wild idea about dropping raw conversion either ( and generally I am an Apple advocate, but still smarting about Aperture ). I would also keep a finder based archive of your photos as this is most portable, easy to back up and you can always make subfolders for 'worked' photos. Whether degraded or not a JPEG is still a compromised file.

Sums it up pretty well; jpeg is a compressed raw.  I'll add that for me (especially as a diver) the main advantage of RAW is the ability to edit whitebalance properly; something that is very difficult with a compressed jpeg.

If you do heavy editing, then use raw.  If you only tweak things and the in camera software is good, usually jpeg suffices.  After whitebalance, raw is good also for large changes in exposure and tint (minor changes, and contrast, are reasonably well handled with jpeg).

I can't imagine I'm unusual in converting all the shots I want to keep to Photoshop (.psd) files as my masters, keeping any layers I add (e.g. Levels). Then they can always be tweaked further, later, if necessary, and exported as jpegs to whomever.

Thought I'd add my two pence into the pot.

Your camera captures an image on the sensor and records that information, for want of a better phrase, as RAW data. It's just data that can not be used or seen until it is converted into a viewable image.

You could ask the camera to convert that RAW data into an image by making decisions on contrast, exposure, White Balance, colour saturation, image sharpness, noise and other things.

Once the camera has converted that image then it saves it in a format that can be read and understood by just about any digital device in the world. A JPEG.

There is nothing wrong with JPEGS if the image is exposed well at capture and you are happy with the results. However when the camera makes all the decisions about the image then it has to throw some data away when saving to JPEG that will never be recoverable and most people would never miss anyway.

Some people would rather take that RAW information and make creative decisions themselves about how they would like the image to turn out.

Rather than have a tiny processor on a camera do the number crunching, they prefer to have a powerful computer and dedicated photo editing software to do the job. The image will eventually have to be turned into a JPEG to share with the world, but at least the photographer has the creative licence to get as much information out of that image as possible to get the best results that he can.

There is a massive time difference when the camera does this in a split second to the photographer spending hours or days editing their images.

You can still edit and manipulate a JPEG but you have less information in that image to work with and are very limited in what you can do before you make a digital mess of that image.

You have an awful lot of creative options with editing a RAW image but that image will eventually have to be turned into a JPEG before you share it with the world.

You just have to decide if it worth all that effort or if you are happy with what the camera can produce in a fraction of a second.

Indeed...

The OP mixes two things together... One being JPEG and RAW format, the other being non-destructive editing.

Lemmings and other explanation of the difference between RAW and JPEG is really good.

The Non destructive editing is also sort of answered, but not in the proper context.

Simply but, non destructive editing creates a separate delta of the changes (either in sidecar file, or in a db), meaning that you can undo the changes, and get back to the original situation... This was already the given explanation, and is valid.... 

The meat of it, is that you only work with the original source file. And in the case of JPEG as Lemming explained, it is not all the data that was captured (which would be the RAW). Not a major deal, if you have taken the picture "correctly"... as in the right WB, ISO/Speed/Aperture etc. But if they aren't all OK to start with, changing the WB on the JPEG will actually loose information (in the sense, that you can't utilize what is not there...), sometime it gives good enough results... other less so. Were you to use RAW, you would have more information available, and thus you have the possibility of producing a better image for export.

In short, non destructive editing builds on top of what you have, but it does not allow you to re-define the baseline if you're using JPEGs... With RAW, you have more information available (even if not visible), so you can even adjust the "baseline" (not really, but in fact use the non-visible data to create a new "baseline" in which to start working).... And since you're using non destructive editing... you can always revert back to the start.

So RAW gives you more options in post (with the cost of requiring more space and also to get good results, more effort). 

Thanks all. Collectively that helps my understanding.

I’m aware RAW is def the way I want to go, But wasn’t really clear on the difference between destructive and non-destructive programs.

But it's more complex than that.

You may well have taken a 'perfect image' ... and then the programmer of the in-camera jpg engine completely screws it up for you and delivers a crappy jpg.

With in-camera jpg, all you are seeing is a single 'compromised' version of the image processed in a few ms to a set of fixed instructions.

With LR/Cap-1, also remember that 'editing' jpgs should also be non-destructive (that's the point of them). The 'edits' only become a new 'thing' when you press Export; with the source file unchanged .. see (*).

(*): check the fine detail of how you have set up the program options.  By default, this should be the case; not used Cap-1 for a long time.

Given that their flagship iPhones capture RAW, I doubt they're planning on dropping conversion in Photos anytime soon. But that said, it's awful for editing in, so another app is needed (personally Lightroom for me, but appreciate not everyone wants to pay the sub).

That makes sense. So it’s not really the edits that degrade the photo. It’s the exporting of the image. 

Can’t help but think RAW capture on an iPhone is a sales gimmick. Given the size of the screen I can’t see what benefit it brings.

You can still do a lot more with an iPhone RAW compared to an iPhone JPEG, but obviously nowhere near as much as on a camera with a bigger sensor.

Indeed... but the in-camera JPEG processing is actually rather good these... heck, it was good some 10 years ago when I got my dSLR.

I'm sure that there are cases, where even having all things "perfect" from photo capture perspective (like we needed to do with film )... the JPEG can look terrible, where as with processing the RAW you might get what you set the camera to capture... But to be honest, of the thousands of photos I've taken over the years... never has been the culprit the in-camera JPEG prosessing... it has always been the settings (ie. I'm shite). While I capture both JPEG and RAW, I mostly just work with the JPEGs (used to have separate LR catalogs even)... And only when the settings have been wrong (exposure not right, too dark or light), do I need to go with the RAWs. And it's not the JPEG processing that was the culprit... my the idiot behind the lens.

Best explanation of this I've seen 

and yet people bang on abut how great the Fuji -X jpgs are ... which means that others are bad to not great.

I've shot with Fuji-X for a good while now; the jpg are OK and way better IMO than Canon or Sony DSLR/Mirrorless jpgs ..., but I can always do better-than-jpg doing a quick RAW conversion using a baseline profile that I've worked out for my Fuji-X & lens combos... done on import, then usually a few tweaks per image.

I shoot a couple of village events every year, so have to quickly process many 100s of images.  I wouldn't use jpgs ... ever, ... I'd just rather not shoot the event..

There are some good answers here but it's worth understanding what a jpg does to compress the original raw data.. 

The jpeg format uses lots of information about how the human eye processes images in order to throw away as much data as possible without affecting the end image too much.

e.g.

stuff in the deep shadows that you can't quite see, chuck it.

texture in areas of low contrast, chuck it

texture in deep shadows that is hard to see, chuck it

colours that you can't differentiate (e.g. the jpg is very blue so chuck out the reds), chuck it.. 

You end up with a photo which just about looks OK as long as you don't do much processing on it. Actually, a low compression jpg (High Quality) can cope with quite a bit of editing but you'll never get the deep shadows recovered well or change the colour temperature significan't if it has a cast, nor will you be able to sharpen things too much without seeing artefacts.. 

Hope that helps!

Thank you 😀

For me photography is a hobby, which means that I enjoy the entire process of capturing an image and then taking the time to mess about with maybe one or two images to get a better result.

with my own camera, I set it up to take RAW images only. I then import those images into my computer using my photo editing software of choice, an old 2016 version of Lightroom which stopped getting updates in 2017.

I then get that software to do a simple basic conversion from the RAW data to something that I can view on the screen. The software uses some pre-defined settings, chosen by me, of white balance, exposure, colour saturation and what ever else I want to those images to have done to them in a fraction of a second.

The computer basically creates something similar to what the camera would have created with its tiny processing power in a fraction of a second. But the important thing is, I am still viewing an image where I have access to all the information/data that the camera took. No information has been thrown away.

I then look at my images and choose which to keep and which to throw in the digital bin.

The important thing, is that I keep the remaining RAW images on my hard drive, which are useless, in the sense that they can not be shared or viewed on any device unless it is specifically designed to look at these RAW images.

I then get the software to export/save those images as duplicate files that any computer, phone or device can see. These are the JPEGS. I could get my camera to create RAW and JPEG files, but then that would take up valuable space on my camera SD card. I would then still have to look at those images and decide which to delete, but this time I have to be careful to delete the correct RAW files along with the unwanted JPEG files. There is then the risk of accidentally deleting the wrong RAW files in this maze of images.

Yes, I now have two copies of the same image, a RAW file and a JPEG. The JPEG can be shared over the internet in an email, WhatsApp or what ever I choose and the RAW file plus JPEG can sit on my hard drive never to be seen again in a digital dungeon.

This takes up a lot of hard drive space. Some time in the future I may want to look at a photo I took in the past and try and sexy it up with a bit of creative editing, possibly when my editing skills have developed, and this is where the RAW file starts to earn its right to languish on my hard drive. I still have a file with all the RAW data captured by my camera where I now have creative licence to make a digital pig’s ear or masterpiece, to share with the world or get printed.

So if, say, someone asks for one of my photos for printing in a book, what form should they ask for? If I just send them the RAW file they won't know how I would have edited it to show the scene authentically as I recall it, but if I send them my exported jpeg, a lot of detail has been lost. Is there a way of sending all the data from the RAW file along with my edit (and would this actually allow a better print anyway)? Send both?

Keeping every RAW file along with jpegs certainly eats up storage. I only keep RAW files of "special" photos that might be used for quality printing or that I might want to re-edit at a later date (maybe about 1 in 10).

It has been edited to the way you want. The printer isn’t going to do any more editing, they are just going to print the image as you artistically intended.

Provided that you edited the image using a calibrated screen, that is calibrated to show the same colours as the Publisher’s screen and their printer is calibrated to print/repoduce the same colours as your JPEG displayed on your screen, then there should be no scary mistakes.

If the Printer/Publisher is worth their salt, they will tell you how to send the image. They may ask for a more detailed version of the image with as little compression as possible. This is where a lossless file format of TIFF may be asked for.

A JPEG is a lossy file format where some maths is used to make the file as small as possible by throwing away colours that you may never notice while a TIFF file keeps all the data/colours the photographer intended. The down side is these files are fekin massive and can be considerably bigger than the RAW files.

The weak link to this chain is if both people have screens that display different colours for the same image. Then there will be tears at the printing stage when for example the sky isn’t as vibrant as the photographer has shown on their screen.

Edit, obviously you know the answer, this is just a vague open reply to those that may not realise.

😀

Like you, I don’t keep everything, but I probably keep more than I should😀

The jpg compression engine is not the issue at hand here.

I can end up with a much better looking jpg from a RAW following set of image processing rules within LR to get a jpg with the same file size as the jpg coming-out the camera.

It's the in-camera image processing engine that causes the issue, not the compression engine.

I've also tested the Fuji-X 'In-Camera' Raw conversion to jpg options: still get average jpgs.

The available in-camera chip/processor/software just can't compete with out-of-camera software/processor options via PC/MAC/Android etc etc 

It does. Thanks 

I've been asked for both formats before - sometimes exported jpgs and other times unsharpened RAW files. Generally though the former is 'good enough'.

You can pass over the RAW edited info. too, google Sidecar / .XMP files.

iPhone Raw perhaps - what about all other cameras? RAW conversion is in the OS not the application so I would not be too trusting personally - LR here also, although I preferred my projects separate from the filing system as in Aperture. 

You could convert the RAW file to a DGN file with the edits and give that to the publisher?

DGN as in digital negative. Which is an open source file format to try and standardise all the proprietary RAW file formats of the different camera manufacturers.

It's got its weaknesses and limitations, but to at least try and standardise RAW file formats to future proof your digital negative has to be a good idea?

I've only once converted to a .DNG when I had to edit a RAW file on a laptop which didn't have LR on it, only PS ( > Adobe Raw). I didn't realise DNGs retained the edit info. too, that's handy to know. 

Not always.

YMMV

A high quality jpg is pretty much the industry standard... As it's optimised for human viewing and it isn't going to be edited afterward, you can't really get much better. It has to still be pretty good 'quality' (maybe 90% or more)

I don't know. Hence my question.

I was once asked for a RAW file by a printer (I didn't have one).

No I don't. Hence why I asked.

If you forward a RAW file Robert, you are allowing someone else to edit you image. How do you feel about that? For example you might prefer to crop the image, or apply lens correction filters. This is before any Contrast, Colour Balance, Sharpness filter is applied. For example I would use different sharpening for either Web or Print. Depending on the final requirement for the image, I generally forward either  Tiff file or J-peg, but never a RAW file. I always keep the original RAW file unedited, but will mostly save manipulated files as Tiff where there is less degradation of repeated manipulation of the image. So it's the 'Save as...'  instruction that is the most important part of editing a photo. The original RAW file remains uncorrupted and in the same condition when originally exposed incamera. Hope that is not too confusing. As Gordon states above he saves as a PDS file which is fine for Photoshop/Lightroom to preserve Layers. But Tiff can also preserve all the Layers, so it could be adjusted either here at a future time or you have recourse to the hopefully, the original RAW file. Sorry to ramble on.

My Bad.

I made the mistake of presuming information that I did not know of your technical skills.

JPEGS at 90-100% are really good for printing. As long as everybody knows that the colours will be faithfully reproduced from the artists/photographer's intention then happy days.

In the Graphics industry Pantone has colours nailed. You ask for colour Pantone 123, then the company half way round the world will have a book with the exact same colour Pantone 123.

The JPEG is a whole new world of pain. You look at your sexy image on your screen and love the way it looks with all the colour and saturation to your heart's desire.

But will the printer/publisher have the exact same screen at the same age and show the same colours as you are looking at?

Will his/her printer faithfully reproduce the same colours on paper?

This is where it's a good idea to have a standardized way of calibrating your screen and that of another screen half way round the world and their printing machine.

Just look at a JPEG on an uncalibrated screen and on a phone screen and see if the colours match. You'll be very lucky.

This isn't a problem if it's a personal hobby but what if you are a company where the colour of the Logo or product is crucial for brand recognition?

Isn't there a licensing issue with Pantone and Adobe products at the moment?

You have to pay to use Pantone:  https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-subscription-anno...

In reply to The Lemming

I can only afford one calibrated screen - moving an image from this to the others is alarming. I had the same background on each monitor for a while, but it was too disconcerting.

Yes.

But it's the concept I am trying to describe, not necessarily the method of Pantone specifically.

Showing your snaps among friends and the internet social media isn't a problem.

But if you want to have your image reproduced faithfully for professional printing then how do you ensure that the image is reproduced faithfully?

Imagine a wedding photographer taking images of the bride in her dress and showing her a beautiful white dress on his screen and she says, "Yep print the wedding book" based on what she saw.

However the printer has a different screen and print process that reproduces the dress as grey or a white with a colour tint or colour cast that is nowhere near what the bride expected.

The bride and groom would probably be very pissed off and refuse to pay for the service you provided.

Or you take photos of a red car for a local car dealer but the printer creates a brochure or web page of a pink or dark red hue of the same car.

Say you take a photo of a landscape that you really like, can you trust that the online photo printer will send you anything close to what is on your screen?

Your deep dark lush greens may come back like tones of autumnal brown ferns.

Having a calibrated screen gives you and the printer/publisher of creating a product close to what you edited on your screen.

Applications like Indesign are fairly liberal in the type of image you can place in your book or document, but these are critically checked for colour consistency and colour space (usually CMYK) before allowing the 'packaging' function which sends everything needed to a folder for the printer and similarly and more commonly done when creating a PDF for print. 

I have a USB calibrating device that I rest against my computer screen and laptop screen.

I bought one device that is good enough for me and my armature ambitions for my choice of online printer (photobox) to send me images that look practically the same to what I expected I would get in the post.

Professional photography or media companies may demand higher levels of calibration qualities but for somebody like me a Pantone x-rite colour calibrator is more than acceptable and indeed good enough for many small businesses.

If you're bothered about a printed images being just how you want it, it's far more important to get a firm grip on 'profiles' (camera, display, printer... aka colour management) than worrying about jpeg limitations. Jpeg is more than good enough as an output format if you use it right.

Way above my pay grade for a hobbyist. Occasionally I titillate a RAW image, turn it into a JPEG and send it off to Photobox to then be put in a photo frame.

Of the 60,000 images in my digital dungeon, I have five images put up on my wall.

Edit

The only time I worry about Colour Management is when I'm editing my video masterpieces. I can and do spend days making little videos to put on YouTube where ten's of people look at.

But at least I know that the colour correction/grading will look good when its been put through the YouTube washing machine algorithm.

I disagree that getting the advantages of RAW necessarily needs a lot of time. I used to do basic editing of jpegs using Windows Photo Gallery and felt too intimidated to switch to RAW. However, when I eventually did so (using Capture Express for Fuji) I immediately got far better results with very little extra time commitment. I set it up so that if I exported a jpeg with no editing it would be indistinguishable from the out of camera jpegs I had been using. I then used exactly the same tools I had been using in Photo Gallery (shadows, highlights, black point, white point, and a little contrast and exposure and very rarely anything else}. I was straight away getting far more out of the shadows and highlights and far more pleasing results. So the only extra task was exporting the jpegs* which is easy.

*I do then make small tweak on the jpegs with no noticeable loss in quality with Photo Gallery which I find very controlled and sensitive.

I think you may have missed this bit where I agree with you. I also use software to convert RAW files into JPEGS in a matter of seconds.

The bit I was trying to explain was about extra time needed for converting those RAW files which you especially liked and wanted to devote more effort to make that specific image the best that you possibly could with extra techniques above and beyond basic contrast, exposure or saturation. Stuff like adding graduated filters, dodging and burning, sharpening, noise reduction, removing unwanted objects, adjusting hues, split toning or adding masks to areas that you wanted to amend or save from changes.

This is the time sucking part of editing RAW images that can either be a pleasure or a nightmare depending on your perspective.

That was in a later post, not the one I was replying to. Anyway, you are talking about using pre-set adjustments, whereas I am saying that individually processing each RAW file need not be any more time consuming than processing out of camera jpegs to get big advantages from RAW.

I mean it’s not a total gimmick, I think it depends on your use case somewhat. For people who take pictures on their phone, look at them on instagram and never edit them, then the raw functionality is pointless.

Personally (and I suspect I’m in the minority) I use the phone to take pictures I otherwise wouldn’t, because I don’t have my camera with me. Then I’ll tend to use raw, and go through the normal processing workflow - it’s much better (and obviously more controlled) than jpg on a bigger screen or for prints, but also not as good as a proper camera. So I think it’s a useful function, with some awareness of the limitations (eg crappy dynamic range and low light).

Honestly I have never tried using any other raw files in the photos app… because well, lightroom. iPhone raw images are dng which is a reasonably standard format (at least in the raw world) and I *think* quite a few cameras can be forced to spit those out. Never checked though, because again, lightroom, and I think of (and use, as it was designed) photos as the equivalent of a printed album. That is I export all my edited images as jpg and catalogue them in photos for easy viewing etc.