Time for a new camera: semi-manual???

[DougPaul]

Recently I've gone over to RAW only (with my Rebel XT). I love the flexibility and fact you can keep going back to the RAW file and changing exposure, white balance, levels of shadows, etc.

Just want to note that you can reprocess JPEGs too--just not as well as with RAWs. Some information is discarded in creating the JPEGs and cannot be recovered.

Doug

 

[David Metsky]

And there is a firmware hack that allows you to get RAW from the S3. I don't know if anyone has hacked the other cameras yet.

-dave-

 

[kmorgan]

Just want to note that you can reprocess JPEGs too--just not as well as with RAWs. Some information is discarded in creating the JPEGs and cannot be recovered.

Doug

I understand that TIFF files are non-lossy, so if you shoot in JPEG, save your files as TIFF's right off to preserve them. Of course you should always back up all your original files on CD or DVD too.

Kevin

 

[DougPaul]

I understand that TIFF files are non-lossy, so if you shoot in JPEG, save your files as TIFF's right off to preserve them.

No.*

The information was lost from the sensor image when the JPEG** was created by the camera. All creating a TIFF from the JPEG does is to make an exact copy of the info in the JPEG. (None of the lost info is recovered--info, once lost, cannot be recovered.) A waste of space because the TIFF will be bigger than the JPEG.

If your camera will not save a RAW file***, just set it to save the higest quality JPEG that it can. Copy the JPEG file (preferably to an off-line medium) to archive it.

If you convert a JPEG to a TIFF and back to a JPEG, information will be lost and the second JPEG will be inferior to the first JPEG. (If a program decodes a JPEG and then re-encodes the image back into a JPEG, the same will happen.)

* Yes, TIFF is a lossless format (ie whenever you convert an image into TIFF no information is lost), but that is not the issue here.

** JPEG is a lossy format (ie whenever you convert an image into JPEG information is lost. This information cannot be recovered).

*** A RAW file is a lossless representation of the sensor data. RAW file formats are company specific.

Doug