Processing Jpegs with Camera Setttings vs Processing a Raw image - Image Quality

[Brownbear]

As someone who most recently switched to photographing raw images from jpegs, who is working on improving their post processing skills, I'm wondering if perhaps the post processing settings (white balance, vivid, portrait, landscape, less contrast, sharpening, brightness, hue, etc) in my camera for jpegs might produce a higher quality image than I am currently capable of processing from raw.

My train of thought is that the processor in my camera is very high tech and therefore very capable at post processing, and that the processor would apply the ideal amount of post processing to the image ie; colour, tone, sharpening, curves contrast setting, resulting in a higher quality image... (perfect contrast, colour, and never an image that has been processed poorly - soft clouds and no artifacts in the sky, over or under sharpened - as long as the camera has also been set perfectly)

So if one ignores the advantages of shooting raw (more detail, easy white balance setting, and artistic vision) when speaking of image quality are the processors in our camera better at post processing images, than a person with beginning to average post processing skills?

Thank you.

[Donald]

...are the processors in our camera better at post processing images, than a person with beginning to average post processing skills?

Possibly and in some cases, definitely.

What that ignores however, is that the person with the beginning-to-average pp skills will never progress beyond that unless they accept that going through that phase is part of the learning process. And once through it you start to leave the camera behind in terms of creativity, adaptability, decision-making.

[Brownbear]

I thought so.

Your 2nd statement is worth a 1000 words. Thanks for the great advice.


Thank you Donald.

Possibly and in some cases, definitely.

What that ignores however, is that the person with the beginning-to-average pp skills will never progress beyond that unless they accept that going through that phase is part of the learning process. And once through it you start to leave the camera behind in terms of creativity, adaptability, decision-making.

[Brownbear]

One more question...

Is the Auto button in Lightroom and Photoshop Element/Photoshop CC when applied to a raw image, along with your chosen contrast and colour settings just as effective as the camera's processing of your chosen settings? ie; just as good a starting point as a jpeg for someone working on improving their post processing skills?

[steve welle]

For me the revelation was that after I learned how to post process raw files fairly well I could turn pictures that were taken suboptimally (for example underexposed, high ISO, not the best lighting) into pretty good images, some excellent. You can never get that with a camera deciding how to make the JPEG. Because few of us always gets it right while shooting, knowing how to process raw files can save us from our sins. Once you know how to process, the properly shot ones can be made spectacular.

[Donald]

One more question...

Is the Auto button in Lightroom and Photoshop Element/Photoshop CC when applied to a raw image, along with your chosen contrast and colour settings just as effective as the camera's processing of your chosen settings? ie; just as good a starting point as a jpeg for someone working on improving their post processing skills?

Don't know the answer to that one. We need the people who use these packages to come in and tell us.

[klovibond]

I use Elements 11, and I can honestly say that I've found all the auto functions, including the Auto button on RAW processing totally useless and incapable of achieving the standard of in-camera Jpeg processing, let alone get anywhere near what I can achieve by making the adjustment to the RAW images myself.

[proseak]

Christina,

You might try shooting raw +Jpeg for now - try things out on the raw files... and try again when you've picked up some new skills, and again when the software improves in the future.

HTH

Peter

[Stagecoach]

Hi Christina,

I have to agree with what Donald has said but will add that it also very much depends upon the image shot.

With certain subjects/scenes I have found that the Jpeg produced in camera can be superior, in my view for my needs, to what I produce from the RAW. At other times my RAW work is better than the camera produced Jpeg. There is no simple answer.

Grahame

[DanK]

I agree with Donald--the camera may do better if your skills are not good. However:

My train of thought is that the processor in my camera is very high tech and therefore very capable at post processing, and that the processor would apply the ideal amount of post processing to the image ie; colour, tone, sharpening, curves contrast setting, resulting in a higher quality image... (perfect contrast, colour, and never an image that has been processed poorly - soft clouds and no artifacts in the sky, over or under sharpened - as long as the camera has also been set perfectly)

I think this is completely wrong, and it is pointing you in the wrong direction. First of all, the processor in your computer is almost certainly much better than the one in your camera. Second, the processor matters in terms of speed, but it doesn't determine how the photo is edited. But the bigger problem is the last thing you wrote. The camera doesn't do anything "ideal." It simply applies, blindly, an processing algorithm you choose, such as the "standard" picture mode. That algorithm was written by someone who has not seen your image. If it is ideal for a particular image, that's just luck.

Why do I say this points you in the wrong direction? Because it leads you to think that the issue is the technology in the camera. It's not. It's your skill in postprocessing. If you don't learn enough about postprocessing, then your results may not be as good as what you get out of the camera, even though the camera's postprocessing is done without any regard for the particular image. If your skills improve, you will get a higher hit rate than the camera does. So if you want to beat the blind luck of trusting the camera, the only option is study and practice.

[Mike Buckley]

One more question...

Is the Auto button in Lightroom and Photoshop Element/Photoshop CC when applied to a raw image, along with your chosen contrast and colour settings just as effective as the camera's processing of your chosen settings? ie; just as good a starting point as a jpeg for someone working on improving their post processing skills?

I saw your question quite awhile ago and deliberately waited to respond until I could provide what I hope will be a helpful response.

I wonder if you're leaving out the most important issue, which has nothing to do with the capabilities of cameras, post-processing software or your knowledge of using them. If I'm right about that, it would be the issue of you knowing with a great deal of confidence how you want your images to appear.

I mention this because I found it was a lot more difficult to learn how I wanted my images to appear than it was to get them to appear that way. I had spent decades looking at other people's prints and displays of my own color slides (not digital scans of them) displayed on screens. When I moved to the digital world, I was suddenly in control of my images like never before and that situation was overwhelming. That's because images displayed on a computer monitor don't look like like prints or slides projected onto a screen, which had been my previous way of experiencing photography.

So, if you're still understandably having trouble knowing how you want your images to appear, the solution is not in learning how to post-process them; it's learning how you want them to appear.

If you know how you want your images to appear, ignore this post because it's not at all applicable to you. However, I do have to mention to you that your threads consistently indicate to me that you aren't at that point, which is completely understandable.

[Macmahon]

One more question...

Is the Auto button in Lightroom and Photoshop Element/Photoshop CC when applied to a raw image, along with your chosen contrast and colour settings just as effective as the camera's processing of your chosen settings? ie; just as good a starting point as a jpeg for someone working on improving their post processing skills?

Christina
I can't truthfully answer this question as I never use the auto button in Lightroom. However, as LR's workflow is completely non-destructive i suggest that you click the auto - see if you like it, then go back to square one and try to achieve the same 'starting point' 'manually'. Better yet, make a virtual copy of the original import and process the two copies separately: one beginning from auto and one all by yourself!
Wiser people than me have said what they think of auto. My 2¢ worth is that I made the image, and I want to control how it looks.
Cheers
Tim

[AndrewMcD]

Christina,
I sometimes, using LR5, will hit the AUTO exposure setting to see what levels the LR5 software will decide upon. More often than not I don't care for it. Frequently LR5 with the AUTO exposure results in what, to my eye, appears to be an overexposed and harsh look. I have no idea what sort of algorithm LR5 uses to make exposure decisions but no doubt it is complex and based on assumptions regarding various camera settings.

Keep in mind that the post processing decisions that your camera might make are guided by the software that human beings wrote. There are no perfect absolutes, at least not that the machine known as your camera is aware of. The camera only does what it is told to do on multiple levels. The adjustments you make are one level. The low level processing decisions internal to the camera are another level but still based in decisions made by humans writing the programming. I don't believe there is a "perfect" group of settings that one can apply to the camera or PP software that will result in the case where "the processor would apply the ideal amount of post processing to the image ie; colour, tone, sharpening, curves contrast setting, resulting in a higher quality image". Every image is different and it ultimately boils down to human decisions.

I think the trick to getting all this right (or at least to the point where we feel some satisfaction) is an iterative process of understanding how things come out when the camera is set in it's various modes followed by figuring out how we want the image to appear. Keep tweaking the camera settings as you refine how YOU want things to look. Repeat 10,000 times. Ah yes, there is that problem of figuring out how YOU want things to look. Perhaps that is what the journey is all about but it certainly feels like a rough road to me sometimes. Well, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it
Andrew

[Manfred M]

Christine - just like Mike, I hung back a bit before trying to answer your question.

First of all - I shoot jprg + RAW almost 100% of the time (I have shot jpeg only, but never RAW only). My reasons are simple; for the majority of my shots, I won't be doing anything to them other than perhaps showing them on my computer screen or tablet or posting them on the internet. In those cases jpegs are "good enough". They aren't art, I'm not exhibiting and most people viewing them are going to do so on low-end screens that have not been calibrated and profiled, so I really don't need to spend any time on them short of uploading the images.

When it comes to the 1% - 5% of my images that are really good; destined for print or photo web sites, then I do want to bring the best out of them and give them "my style", rather than the style some Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Sony, etc engineer has designed into my camera. That is also the very same reason never use any of the "auto" settings in Photoshop; these are again based on algorithms that some Adobe engineer has designed. They may look okay for an "average" image, but then they will never look special.

Just as an aside to one of your questions. so far as I can tell all of these auto functions disregard your in-camera settings and come up with something based on the file that you have opened.

I found that when I first started working with RAW files about 5 years ago (my previous cameras only produced jpegs), I was a bit like everyone else who first started out, overwhelmed by the multitude of choices that the editing software gave me. Frankly I was overwhelmed (I started out using Photoshop CS) and would use the tools that I knew, which often ended up not being the best choice, but I made headway over time (remember I was a film photographer and did my own B&W and colour darkroom work; the controls one had over an image were very limited when compared with a digital workflow).

The mistakes I made were both being too aggressive in my RAW conversions, in some respects, and too timid in others.

That being said, there is an old saying' "the best way to eat an elephant is doing so one bite at a time". I think this approach (which is the one I took) is to learn and become comfortable with one function at a time. When it comes to RAW conversion, getting the colour balance right (i.e. white balance), input sharpening and contrast adjustment (curves and setting the black and white points) and occasionally tweaking the exposure are what I concentrated on at first. The camera raw converters used my jpeg camera presets for everything else (via the xmp sidecar file), so I knew I would be close.

Anything else could be done at a later stage of post-processing, but these were critical; so I concentrated on getting these right. I suggest that might be where you might want to start, becuase they will give you a very clean image to start doing all that fancy stuff on later.

[davidedric]

Hi Christina,

I shoot in RAW, do my pp in Lightroom 5.3, and never use the Auto button. With all the flexibility and tools that Lightroom offers, I much prefer to start from scratch.

Dave

[dabhand]

Christina,

Manfred makes a very good point when he says

"First of all - I shoot jprg + RAW almost 100% of the time (I have shot jpeg only, but never RAW only). My reasons are simple; for the majority of my shots, I won't be doing anything to them other than perhaps showing them on my computer screen or tablet or posting them on the internet. In those cases jpegs are "good enough". They aren't art, I'm not exhibiting and most people viewing them are going to do so on low-end screens that have not been calibrated and profiled, so I really don't need to spend any time on them short of uploading the images."

The hard part with PP is knowing what each tool does and how some may be used to modify the impact of others and there are many plugins which attempt to facilitate the process - but all these programs have (at least for me) quite a steep learning curve and I found it best to take a step back and follow a structured course from foundation onwards when I decided (for various reasons) to move from P/shop to a combination of Lightroom and the NIK suite for the majority of my work.

If you are looking at P/shop adobe have one such at http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/201...-knowhow.html; if L/Room Julieanne Kost has good videos at http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos and of course there are plenty of others.

Once you know how to use the tools you can then work out how best to use them to process in your own style.

steve

[dabhand]

Christina,

Manfred makes a very good point when he says

"First of all - I shoot jprg + RAW almost 100% of the time (I have shot jpeg only, but never RAW only). My reasons are simple; for the majority of my shots, I won't be doing anything to them other than perhaps showing them on my computer screen or tablet or posting them on the internet. In those cases jpegs are "good enough". They aren't art, I'm not exhibiting and most people viewing them are going to do so on low-end screens that have not been calibrated and profiled, so I really don't need to spend any time on them short of uploading the images."

The hard part with PP is knowing what each tool does and how some may be used to modify the impact of others and there are many plugins which attempt to facilitate the process - but all these programs have (at least for me) quite a steep learning curve and I found it best to take a step back and follow a structured course from foundation onwards when I decided (for various reasons) to move from P/shop to a combination of Lightroom and the NIK suite for the majority of my work.

If you are looking at P/shop adobe have one such at http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/201...-knowhow.html; if L/Room Julieanne Kost has good videos at http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos and of course there are plenty of others.

Once you know how to use the tools you can then work out how best to use them to process in your own style.

steve

[Brownbear]

Thank you to everyone for your helpful replies, advice and for the links.

I recently switched back to jpegs and raw, just to help me with some kind of visual for post processing. I'm not crazy about twice the number of files but will do for now.

Yes, I'm still trying to figure out how I wish my images to look. With some images it is easy, with others I'm a little lost.

Anyhow I'm glad that I asked the question that has been in the back of my mind. Very helpful to know about, and everyone's replies are very informative and let me know that I need to work on developing a stronger vision of how I wish my images to appear and tackle post-processing.

Thank you to all!

[Brownbear]

Once again, thank you to everyone for your helpful replies. Truly helpful and very much appreciated.

Grahame... yes, in particular I've noticed that some of my jpegs with clouds and sky in them look better than my edits, which doesn't make sense to me because I don't think clouds and sky should be sharpened but perhaps sometimes they need to be. I'm going to tackle that cloud image.

Dan... Thank you for taking the time to correct my train of thought, and explain why. Yes, of course their is a person behind the processing set in the camera, and also in photo editing programs.

Mike... Thank you for taking the time to share. Yes, I'm struggling with developing a vision for my images while post processing. I can see the vision when I take the image but frequently become lost while trying to process the image. My post processing skills have improved a lot, since just last year but I still have a lot to learn, so it is a bit of both, and always depends on the image.

Tim... Yes, indeed it is often the case that I don't care for the image at all, after hitting the auto button. It's partly developing a vision and partly how to use the processing tools in the best way. And yes, of course there is a person behind all the preset processing functions !

Manfred & Andrew... Yes, I'm finding post processing a little overwhelming. I will keep my camera set to jpeg and raw, and try just that working on the better photos, using the basics, working on them bring out the best until I'm confident with my skills with those tools. Thank you for sharing your stories, and some great advice. Consuming an elephant, one bit at a time is certainly an apt description.

Steve, Kevin and Dave, Peter... thank you for sharing, for the helpful advice and for the links on Photoshop.

Thank you to all. This thread has been very helpful.



Dave... the

[Andyjo]

I haven't read all of the responses (sorry) but my reply is fairly short.

For more information on the benefit of RAW vs JPEG, dpreview have a good comparison tool. You just need to search for a camera, click the full review. Dpreview

If you shoot in jpeg you will lose detail whereas if you shoot in RAW you will get better detail however, shooting in RAW can give you quite a lot of noise. Play around with both and see what works for you

Andy