Got a Lumix GF1 recently and all things appear to saw that its RAW files are superb etc etc. but Jpegs aren’t that great, compared to the RAW that the camera kicks out

Is it really worth the hassle to photograph in RAW and then process all the photos in Silkypix?

Can I simply batch process, assuming the photos have been exposed correctly etc at photo stage?

Worth it, to me anyway, to process the RAW files yourself, but not with Silkypix. I use Lightroom or CaptureOne, but probably there are cheaper alternatives.

As above, not silkypix – it’s horrible

BUT, try playing with the film type settings first to see if you can improve things. Unless you are always trying to take great pictures the whole RAW thing is a pain. Just use it when you really need to

^ this

It’s the cameras own jpeg compression giving you the undesirable results so monkey with those a bit and see what happens. Also possibly a firmware upgrade might help. That’s a stab in the dark but you never know.

I use Lightroom and the process is painless. Once imported, You can edit multiple photos as a batch e.g. Contrast, sharpening, noise reduction, white balance etc. or you can get Lightroom to do it for you when you import.

It also makes a great photo database and has plugins to upload directly to flickr and so on. I also think it’s halved in price since I got it.

No idea about silkypix, I use dxo, but in general…

I could process the lot in two mouse clicks. I don’t though. I go through each, discarding duff ones and duplicates, straighten, crop, tweak exposure, fiddle curves, sharpen and generally fix each one. Which is really the point of raw.

I use Lightroom and the process is painless. Once imported, You can edit multiple photos as a batch e.g. Contrast, sharpening, noise reduction, white balance etc. or you can get Lightroom to do it for you when you import.

It also makes a great photo database and has plugins to upload directly to flickr and so on. I also think it’s halved in price since I got it.

+1

RAW and Lightroom are a great and easy to use combination for awesome looking pictures.

RAW and Lightroom are a great and easy to use combination for awesome looking pictures.

+1

Worth the hassle for me for great control over the final image. You can often recover a lot more dynamic range out of the photo and use graduated filters etc much much more effectively than on a jpeg, and change WB etc.

The beauty of Lightroom is that you don’t really care what format the photos are in – it treats them all the same.
Before I got Lightroom, I found RAW a pain.

I’d assume the difficult part for JPEGs on the GF1 are noise processing and high contrast scenes. So maybe stick to RAW when you need to take pictures in low light or pictures that contain very bright and very dark parts. Other than that play with the JPEG settings so they look good to you and stick to JPEG.

And yes throw away silkypix get a copy of CaptureOne/Lightroom/Aperture

Lightroom here. Seamless.
RAW gives so many more options for post-processing.

I also own a GF1. Love its portability and image quality.
I only shoot raw with it and my other cameras (unless its for web usage).
Software wise, lightroom has a steep learning curve, as its not as intuitive as Aperture, but it terms of features and organization, its absolutely perfect. I stopped using photoshop all together.

Enjoy that camera 😀

If you don’t want to invest in software right away and run a Mac or Linux then Darktable is very good. If you have windows then RAW therapee is also worth a look.

I use lightroom and would say it is worth every penny, but if Darktable had been availiable for the Mac when I bought Lightroom I would have used that.

I always use RAW on my Canon 7D – memory cards are so cheap now I can’t see any reason to use jpeg when the only advantage is smaller file size.
I import them straight into Apple Aperture and tweak as required. For most uses the RAW pictures are fine straight out of the camera, but I’ll pick a few for each set and play around with them. I might fine tune the exposure and white balance, then add a little extra contrast and sharpening.
It’s definitely worth investing in some decent software – if you’ve bought a good camera then taking the photo is only half the process. You need to spend a bit of time playing around and fine tuning to get the finished result.
I only export them to jpegs to upload to the web, or if I’m sending them to other people.

The reason it’s always advisable to shoot in RAW formats and convert to jpeg on your PC, is because your PC has X times the processing power of your camera, runs x time more powerful software, and can do X times a better job.

I batch process all my RAW files to a 800 pixel high jpeg for web use/viewing convenience. Any that I’m going to print I work on the original RAW files again.

After doing some RAW – JPEG tests RAW was the clear winner in terms of sharpness and clarity.

Me being me can’t now use JPEG from this camera as it will be like limiting the picture size from maximum to medium or whatever, we all have the option of but probably never do…

Probably buy Lightroom after the trial expires.

I just bought a Lumix GF2 (3rd hand, but still only 2 years old)

I’ve got it set to RAW + JPEG. Some pictures I take are just ‘snaps’ and it’s not worth it to me to edit these from RAW, but lots of the pictures, I like to tweak. This way, I have a speedy option and a detailed option. And as mentioned above, memory cards are cheap enough. I still get ~700 RAW + JPEG shots on the card.

I think the GF1 has RAW + JPEG – it might be a good halfway house.

I think the GF1 has RAW + JPEG – it might be a good halfway house

I have the GF1 and used to do that but in the end I found it just a pain having to clear up twice as much stuff. So now when i really want to take a good pic I switch to RAW, otherwise I just leave it on JPEG.

Lightroom rocks as well – it’s just a bit pricey. But if I was using RAW all the time I would get it

edit: just checked and not so pricey any more. Might have to go buy

So do people rate lightroom above photoshop?? 😯 Been running photoshop but might be missing a trick here…?

Edit – just looked into lightroom – more of a database management tool than editing tool…

Both have their place, but for general editing I find I can do 80-90% of what I need in Lightroom and drop into Photoshop only when required for specific tools / adjustments.

Give the free trial a go and see how you get on, you may be converted

but Jpegs aren’t that great, compared to the RAW that the camera kicks out

You should be able to get JPGs from the camera as good as the RAW images. My guess would be that you’ve got the compression or noise reduction settings on too high by default.

I’d say RAW is for when you know you’re gong to want to faff with the pictures. It’s not really about extra quality.

Edit – just looked into lightroom – more of a database management tool than editing tool…

Not really. I’ve lived in photoshop all my working life (since 1996), but now only 1 in 100 photos touches it.
Lightroom handles everything except physical re-arrangement of the image. i.e. if you wanted to clone something out, go to photoshop. If you want to stretch the left-hand side while leaving the right intact, go to photoshop.
But all the cropping, straightening, white balance, curves, colour, B&W conversions, sharpening, noise-reduction, vignetting, etc all gets done in Lightroom.
The magic lies in a couple of things.
1) RAW and JPEG get treated the same, no extra conversion process involved. Edit iPhone photos alongside DSLR images.
2) The original images are always intact, the changes are stored in a database and can be applied to or removed from as many images as you like.
3) Batch processes like exporting, printing, applying presets, etc is all really well supported.

I used to find taking photos slightly annoying, because of all the post-processing that was required. Everytime I filled a memory card, I’d dread the number of hours needed at the computer. That dread is totally gone now with Lightroom.

The reason it’s always advisable to shoot in RAW formats and convert to jpeg on your PC, is because your PC has X times the processing power of your camera, runs x time more powerful software, and can do X times a better job.

Except the camera has specialised processors designed and dedicated to the task, whereas your PC has an all-purpose processor that’s running loads of other stuff as well. Which is why the camera can do 5 RAW conversions a second (or whatever) whereas your PC will take several seconds at least.

The advantage of shooting in raw is that you don’t lose data – you have more leeway with things like white balance later.

just looked into lightroom – more of a database management tool than editing tool…

the way I use LR it’s more an editing tool than a database (i really should l look into the ‘database’ side of it) – <5% of my editing is done in PS now – as MattP – I only drop into PS for tools that are not in LR or a bit more ‘blunt’ in LR – cloning, for example.

Import to LR, run though the files and pick my ‘keepers’, run though and edit them – as a (mainly) wedding photog there are batches of shots that I can pull together and edit ‘as one’ – actually, you edit the first shot then instruct LR to apply those changes to the rest of the batch. Overall i’ve saved who knows how many hours editind, compared to when I used to use (badly, I admit) just PS.

After doing some RAW – JPEG tests RAW was the clear winner in terms of sharpness and clarity.

RAW is completely unsharpened and straight out of the camera is flat, boring and certainly not sharp. If you mean that you can sharpen a RAW file in such a way that it’s sharper (or rather, sharpened to look better) than a straight out of camera JPEG then of course that’s true, but then you can always do your JPEG sharpening out of the camera as well and unless you are viewing at massive sizes I would doubt there would be a “clear winner”.

Olympus supposedly have the best JPEG processing algorithms. To convert your RAW data into JPEGS using their algorithm, you can use their processing software.. or just have the camera do it, cos the results are identical.

RAW will look better if your camera’s set to high levels of noise reduction for JPEGS.

I only drop into PS for tools that are not in LR or a bit more ‘blunt’ in LR – cloning, for example.

This is improved in the new LR5 beta.

And LR is definitely not just a database tool – 95% of my editing can be done in LR, and it’s super fast to do.

With the GF1, the built in jpeg engine is not amazing, you can get much better results with RAW.

I am so used to using PS for everything that I never managed to get used to using LR instead. I think I will have to give LR another stint.

Another thing to consider with RAW are the possibilities that may arise in the future for your files.
Lightroom started life as something else, developed with the help of Andy Rouse and bought out by Adobe. It will develop and grow in time to who knows what. Assuming they keep backward compatibility, you’ll be able to get much more from your RAW data than you can now.
I use Nikon and their Capture NX software. It’s clunky and slow but produces incredible results. I can now process ‘old’ D70 and D2H files in ways that simply weren’t possible back when they were current cameras. There is no reason that this will not continue to develop (pardon the pun) in the future.

There has been some fairly odd advice in this thread IMHO. The whole ‘RAW is only for when you know you are going phaff with the photos afterwards’ argument is silly.
You sometimes never know when you are going to trip the shutter on a great shot. Always shoot RAW – just in case you happen upon a masterpiece. Memory cost virtually nothing so there is no file size argument, you can ask a whole myriad software to just spit out a jpeg in seconds so there is no time argument either really.

As a side note/interesting geeky fact, with Nikon (not sure about any others), if you shoot RAW only, you are actually shooting RAW + JPEG already as all Nikon Cameras automatically make a jpeg of each image they capture – it’s what you are looking at on the LCD screen on the back of the camera.

Richard My Flickr Page

Olympus supposedly have the best JPEG processing algorithms. To convert your RAW data into JPEGS using their algorithm, you can use their processing software.. or just have the camera do it, cos the results are identical.

The olympus raw converter is truly awful though. Cumbersome, lacks features and blows up.

Not really why you use raw though. It’s the extra headroom you get over jpeg to adjust exposure, and the ability to set white balance, dial in the amount of sharpening and curves you want after the event rather than get stuck with what the camera was set too.

It effectively moves the time taken to get a perfect shot from real time, which may potentially be a fraction of a second, to offline, at your leisure – as much time as you need.

Assuming they keep backward compatibility, you’ll be able to get much more from your RAW data than you can now.

Yup, LR4 is significantly better than LR3 at recovering highlight/shadow detail – pretty amazing what you can do sometimes.

Yes. I use Lightroom. If you’re on a mac then Aperture is nice as well.

I’ve been trying to come up with a decent workflow for ages. I originally was using raw+jpg, with the intention of then browsing the jpgs and giving them star ratings. Then for say 1-3* I’d delete the raw, and 4-5* I’d delete the jpg. I was trying to write scripts to do this but that’s a PITA.. I was using Photoshop Elements 8.0 at the time.

Then I thought maybe I could just shoot RAW to save on memory card space and the annoyance of having two copies of every photo, and maybe batch process the lower quality RAWs into JPGs using the Olympus software. Not tried that yet.

Thinking about it, maybe I could use the filters in elements organiser to do this a slightly different way.. hmm… maybe not.. tricky.

Just shoot raws. You can preview a raw just like a jpeg, delete the dodgy ones etc then process.

Spend a few quid on a commercial raw processor though, the olympus software is unbelievably bad.

robocopy is very handy for automating archiving etc.

You can preview a raw like a jpg in Windows and certainly in Elements organiser.. but it takes way longer to generate the thumbnails which is a bit of a pita when browsing.

When you say ‘a few quid’… Elements is about all I can stretch to.

The issue with only using RAW is that I can soon fill up absolutely tons of disk space. It’s cheap, but it’s not free! And backups start to become an issue, some sort of offline backup would be nice but I don’t know if I’m organised enough to back up to a rotating set of portable HDs kept off-site, and online storage options for tens of GBs of RAW files are costly.

Just import all your raw photos into Lightroom then you can browse them and delete ones you don’t want. Dunno why you’d bother adding another seemingly pointless stage to your workflow.

I don’t own lightroom, and I don’t want to fill tons of storage with snaps at 11 MB each. That’s the point.

You can preview a raw like a jpg in Windows and certainly in Elements organiser.. but it takes way longer to generate the thumbnails which is a bit of a pita when browsing.

As tom suggest, the raw converter allows you to browse.

When you say ‘a few quid’… Elements is about all I can stretch to.

Lightroom is £59, cheaper than elements. Granted, it’s not much help if you’ve already bought elements.

The issue with only using RAW is that I can soon fill up absolutely tons of disk space. It’s cheap, but it’s not free! And backups start to become an issue, some sort of offline backup would be nice but I don’t know if I’m organised enough to back up to a rotating set of portable HDs kept off-site, and online storage options for tens of GBs of RAW files are costly.

It always baffles me when people suggest size is a problem. I’ve got thousands of raws on my hard drive and backed up to a nas. Raws take up negligible space compared to terabyte disks. You can just backup the jpegs the same way as you would have done and you’re no worse off than if you’d been shooting raws if it all goes wrong.

1TB internal hard drives are well under £50 now I believe. Just got an external for about that price as well.

If I have thousands of JPGs it’s small enough to be synced to some sort of online storage service, which is nice and easy. Not so with RAWs.

But I suppose so, even if it does seem rather wasteful.

I wonder if I can easily export a JPG from a RAW using the as-shot settings in Elements 10? Hmm.. haven’t actually tried that. I have found though thtat you can share images on FB with a single click even if they are RAWs, which is nice. I have not yet checked if it applies the as-shot settings to those.