Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Do you keep your photos in Raw or Jpeg?

Peripherally flying related

A couple of years ago I went on a 2-day Lightroom course, and the presenter was really keen to show the “Adobe paradigm” for “leveraging” the technology and to basically keep everything in Raw and use Lightroom as the default picture viewer.

That way, the edits you did in LR are applied when you view the pics, obviously (that is how LR works).

There are a few problems however:

  • the raw files are massive – say 40MB – and only a really top-end PC will load them usefully fast enough for a “slide show”
  • you are tied to LR for ever, especially if you “leveraged the paradigm” correctly and used LR for tagging the photos as well (tag formats are all mutually incompatible AFAICT)
  • raw formats change… DNG is the most common by far but e.g. the latest Sony cameras, and current Windows phones, generate DNG which only the very latest software can read
  • Adobe no longer sell LR but rent it, for ~€10/month (depending on what you have) which is IMHO outrageous
  • your picture viewer will stop working if you rebuild your computer post-crash (due to licensing issues – ref. the CS2/3 and validation server fiasco) or, eventually, if you block internet connectivity
  • LR is a rather crappy and bloated program for looking at lots of pics
  • there aren’t many other options for viewing raw files; ACDSEE (v7+) is one (v7 won’t handle the latest DNGs), but you still need a fast PC…

So, I think it’s a bad idea. I export to high quality jpegs, about 15MB in size. Even the oldest pic viewer from 15-20 years ago opens every Jpeg I have ever seen.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have always kept my raw files since I have a camera which can store raw format (must be almost 15 years now). I treat them like the negative film from the days of chemical photography. You can always get good prints from a negative, but not the other way round.
The raw data converters have been improving a lot over the years and with the latest versions I can get visibly better results from my 15 year old RAWs than I did then. What I normally do is copy all the raw data to my computer, convert the decent ones to jpeg and put them into iPhoto (or “Photos” as they call it now). After that, I copy the raw data to two external disks and delete the originals from the camera and the computer.

EDDS - Stuttgart

However, that sounds like you really keep jpegs for stuff you want to see again, and “dump” the raws somewhere from where they can be retrieved if really needed.

I used to do that with slides. I had about 10k of them eventually and obviously most were never seen. Then I scanned them in (bought a Nikon scanner with a bulk feeder and sold it on Ebay afterwards) but discarded 1/2 of them before the scanning.

As always the other issue is how do you back the stuff up. A RAID drive doesn’t count because often the PSU blows up and takes out the lot

I have the jpegs classified and instantly accessible. Not online though…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

I used to do that with slides. I had about 10k of them…

Scanning my slides is one of the tasks which I have been postponing for years. Luckily the quality and speed of scanners keeps improving, so I can only gain by waiting al little longer

Peter wrote:

As always the other issue is how do you back the stuff up.

As written above, I use two separate external disk drives for that. Ideally one is stored in a different location so that one does not lose everything should the house burn down. Only yesterday I bought a new one and found out that – as usualy – capacity has gone up again and the price dropped even more. One Terabyte is around 35 Euros now, end user price including taxes. The 3TB disk that I got for less than 100 Euros can hold 75.000 of your 40MB RAW files (if I did not confuse my exponents again). At my present rate of taking pictures this might last for a decade.

EDDS - Stuttgart

Luckily the quality and speed of scanners keeps improving, so I can only gain by waiting al little longer

You will find that the speed of a scanner is irrelevant if you have to push them in manually. The key is to get a bulk feeder, say 50 at a time, and then you can chuck them in and have it grind away while you do something else. I scanned to ~100MB TIFFs and batch converted them to decent jpegs (well, anything that was on film doesn’t produce decent-anything really, in modern terms) in photoshop which does it very well.

I bought a £1000 scanner and a £500 feeder and sold it all for £500, IIRC. Nikon did another scanner which was £5000 and in my tests not really better. All these are dead products now. I think I had this

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Adobe no longer sell LR but rent it, for ~€10/month (depending on what you have) which is IMHO outrageous

You can still buy LR with a perpetual licence here:-

Adobe LR Perpetual Licence

But personally, when you can get LR + Photoshop for less than a tenner a month I don’t see the point.

Last Edited by stevelup at 24 Nov 17:01

I’m certainly no expert but I have just started using Lightzone. It seems to work OK.

Forever learning
EGTB

Stickandrudderman wrote:

I’m certainly no expert but I have just started using Lightzone. It seems to work OK.

That’s really good for a free software. Unfortunately it can not read the RAW format of one of my two cameras.

EDDS - Stuttgart

Just looked up Lightzone… very interesting and thanks for the tip.

I find LR over-complicated, especially in the way it tries to manage your workflow. Even in details like you import pictures from a directory and while LR is running you drop some more in there, there is no obvious way to make the additions appear in LR. I can do it but it is damn obscure, and litters the PC with temp files. But it’s clear it was designed for non IT competent professional photographers (the entire audience on that course) who drop everything into “My Pictures” i.e. c:\docs and settings\pictures or the win7+ equivalent under c:\users or the Mac equivalent. LR does however work “obviously” enough for getting raws directly off a USB connected camera which presents itself as a logical drive e.g. g:\PENTX001 etc.

One interesting thing is that Lightzone apparently doesn’t support lens profiles and thus lens correction, for spherical and chromatic aberrations. Not a big deal… That’s another thing that drives users to the ever later version of LR, but I found that the correction files can be trivially transferred from LR 6.x all the way back to LR 3.×.

I found the only freebie prog which can read the latest DNGs is IRfanview. It can batch convert, IIRC. But I no longer get involved with any such camera.

The Q I originally meant was whether anyone uses Raw files as their principal image library.

It’s clearly not feasible unless the viewer applies, as each image is viewed, the corrections you had to apply to the image. At a minimum there will be the colour temperature of the light source. (The raw format excludes any white balance correction). So for example while there are viewers which can display all the various raw formats (possibly ACDSEE v7+ is the first one I can think of; it’s the oldest one) where will the colour temp be stored? Hence LR is pushed as the picture viewer.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

There’s an ‘as shot’ colour temperature (expressed as a CIE-xy pair) embedded in the metadata of the RAW file.

Certainly this is the case for DNG files and Canon CR2 files.

23 Posts
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top