Cooking With Colour

Raw vs. JPEG

There is much debate on web forums about which is best, shooting in raw or JPEG. For some types of photography JPEG is the obvious choice—sports and press photographers, for example, often shoot so much that raw would be a huge workflow impediment; JPEG is just so much faster and more convenient. For others like fine art photographers and studio workers, shooting in raw is the only way to achieve the absolute highest technical quality possible. In a lot of other situations, though, things are not so clear cut. In the year I've owned my D70 I've gone through stages of shooting raw only, to JPEG only, and now back again.

Revisitation Revelation

I recently made a few changes in the Freshfield Forest gallery , reprocessing using Nikon Capture the raw files I shot last February (they were originally cooked in RawShooter). For this type of photo I've found, somewhat to my surprise, that NC gives much nicer colours than RS. The difference is amazing! This photo is probably the best example—notice the ferns in the bottom right are nice and green compared to the surroundings, particularly when put up against the original RS version. This experimentation process is useful because the adjustments I make in NC are the same as those which can be made in-camera using the Optimize Image menu, meaning for a lot of things I can shoot in JPEG mode and get the look I want right out of the camera. The problem is there are a lot of variables: Color Mode, white balance and Tone Compensation all work together in various ways to produce a large number of diffferent looks all from the same scene—90 or so in all, and that's not counting the Preset and rather unpredictable Auto white balance settings. It's a lot to learn and even after a year I'm still only scratching the surface. This is in many ways analogous to film shooters experimenting with different combinations of film, developer and paper (in fact paper and printer introduce yet another level of complexity to digital imaging but I won't go into that) and eventually they learn what combinations work best for them under what circumstances.

Ice And Fire

As I emphasised above, Nikon colour (as produced by the camera or NC) isn't a universal solution. While RS isn't so good at the ‘nice’ look, it excels at gritty high-contrast images like this. That's not to say RS can't do ‘nice’ in some situations. A lot of the time it's perfectly acceptable, particularly when workflow is taken into consideration. Workflow seems to be an issue only now being taken seriously my application vendors and for the uninitiated it simply describes the whole process from shoot to print or archive. RawShooter has an excellent workflow system, especially the Premium version with its integrated import (from memory card), contact sheet, crop and rotate, and output sizing options. It's very easy and quick to copy the images to your computer, separate the wheat from the chaff, pick out the best wheat, then make all sorts of adjustments in real-time. The last point is vital: RawShooter gives you immediate (or within a second or so) feedback of adjustments you make. It's fast. Moving from one image to the next is virtually instant and you can create ‘versions’ of the same image to quickly see how different adjustments of the same raw file compare. By contrast Nikon Capture is frustratingly slow and I find a good percentage of my time with it is spent drumming my fingers on my desk waiting for it to process something. Nikon Capture's workflow is glacial, RawShooter's is pyroclastic.

But What About...?

RawShooter and Nikon Capture (and D70 JPEGs) aren't the only options of course. I haven't even touched on Adobe Camera Raw, a favourite with many photographers, and the whole boatload of other raw processors like Capture One, Bibble, BreezeBrowser, Raw Magick Lite and various vendor-specific applications like Canon Digital Photo Pro. Then there's the two new big-hitters: Adobe's Lightroom and Apple's Aperture, both promising to offer the ultimate photographic workflow solutions, a bit like RawShooter on steroids. As I write this both are Mac only so I haven't had the chance to fiddle but Adobe are promising a Windows beta of Lightroom soon. I can't wait!

The Bottom Line

At the moment I'm still in a raw shooting phase, due in no small part to the discovery of Nikon Capture. It's like having the opportunity to shoot the same scene 90 different times to find out which combination of settings works best, with the added bonus of being able to cook the shot in RawShooter or Adobe Camera Raw for yet more interpretations. However I think for a lot of shooting I might go back to JPEG, though I'm not certain. The reinterpretation of old photos has really brought home to me one of the major advantages of raw and I don't want to give up that potential. Just because I think at the time a particular image style (e.g. high contrast low saturation) works best, I might decide at a later date that a different look would have worked better. Raw gives me that option. On the other hand, getting the image as I want it right out of the camera is a huge timesaver and very satisfying, though as I've said it's a long learning curve. But then the raw processing programs open up options that simply aren't available on the camera, such as black-and-white, custom curve adjustments, tinting, non-standard white balances and more.

Suffice to say I'm still somewhat on the fence. For some things I definitely will shoot JPEG, like when I have to shoot a lot (the yacht race being a prime example—I took over 300 photos in the space of an hour). For other situations, I'll do what seems appropriate at the time, learning as I go.