jpg vs RAW

I guess I’m officially a camera snob now.  No more shooting in JPEG for anything other than quick shots, as I’ve finally got an example of where all the extra data kept in the RAW image can come in handy.  I did some shots of the moon last night because with the new 75-300mm lens I picked up, I can get 50% ‘closer’ than with Amanda’s 80-200mm.  With the increase in megapixels as well, this means that I’m able to do a 100% (i.e. 1 pixel on screen equals 1 pixel from the image) crop and get the moon to fill a chunk of a standard 1000×667 pixel ‘web sized’ image.  I was shooting in RAW + jpg so I could do some after-shot comparisons, and found some rather startling results.  I’ve read both sides of the RAW vs jpg debate, from folks who only shoot RAW, to those that only shoot both, to those who only shoot jpg unless they’re getting paid for the shots or some nonsense.

As it turns out, there is indeed demonstrably more information in a RAW image than the corresponding jpg, as evidenced below.  First, the overall 15.1 megapixel picture of the moon, to give you a sense of the scale of the 1:1 crop further down:

Now with scale established (yes, the moon is 50% larger in this image than previous stuff shot with Amanda’s camera), I’ll proceed to the 100% crops.  The jpg image is exactly as downloaded from the camera, and the RAW has had a bit of exposure correction, brightness and contrast correction, and mild sharpening applied.  While some might not consider this fair, it is very apparent on first glance that there is detail available in the RAW image which lies in ‘JPEG-gradient’ areas of the camera’s ‘universally usable’ jpg image, as the camera applies its own set of filters before saving the image to the memory card.  I’d imagine I can futz with those settings to get the jpg images as close to the RAW in terms of detail, and I will do that.  However, for ‘important’ shots, it’ll be RAW or RAW+jpg shooting, as there’s more you can do to fix the RAW image in post-processing just because there’s more data there.

You guess which is which:

Oh, and for fun, I shot a picture of a floating mountain on the way into work yesterday:

The bottom of the image denotes the haze line where you couldn’t see anything until nearly down to ground level, where the base of the mountain was visible, semi-detached from the peaks above.

Here’s the full frame the mountain peak above was extracted from:

Yes, I’m a nerd.  But that’s okay.