I have just obtained a rather nice Finepix HS30EXR bridge camera.

Im pretty used to old film SLRs etc and have had a basic zoom compact for a bit too.

Still learning some of the more advanced sides of digital stuff. The camera has the option of RAW processing. What are the benefits of using RAW rather than JPEGs?
I dont have photoshop, do I need it for dealing with RAW stuff?
Any good photography forums, equivalent of STW for cameras?

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Raw gives you a bit of headroom when you want to post process your photos. Especially when it comes to dynamic range and shadows / highlights. If you shoot jpeg you lose a fair amount of that ability as there is a lot of information lost during compression.

You do not need photoshop, which is at least overkill for some basic post processing but you will need some software to deal with RAWs. Your camera might have come with one but a couple of paid for choices are Lightroom and Aperture. They are both RAW post processing applications as well as cataloguing / organisational tools. Both are rather good though Aperture is Mac exclusive and also hasn’t been updated for a while. I still prefer it to Lightroom as I find Lightroom not as user friendly.

I would start with talkphotography as a forum. Might be worth checking fuji’s specific forum as well.

Not sure about decent camera forums….

You will need some kind of RAW converter – not necessarily photoshop and one might have come bundled with the camera.

RAW files haven’t been fiddled about with in terms of sharpness, white balance, noise reduction etc. like the default jpegs will have been fiddled with by the camera’s built in processing.
RAW files ‘should’ result in better quality images, but it depends what you are doing with them really, as to whether you will notice the difference or not.
You can recover detail from a RAW file that you might not be able to get from the jpeg version – for example, subtle cloud detail in a bright sky.

FWIW, I have never bothered with RAW. The files are too large, I can’t be doing with processing every file and whenever I have done a direct comparison between RAW (processed by myself) & JPEG (as directly outputted by my camera) I haven’t noticed any difference worth bothering with.

RAW files will probably slow your camera down a bit – depends what you are shooting as to whether that is a problem or not. Biggest issue will be shot to shot times. I know on lower end compacts that have a RAW function, this can be several seconds.
You will also not be able to store as many images on a card – although probably not an issue given that 32Gb cards aren’t exactly expensive.

I would see if you have a RAW converter bundled with your camera and if so, take some RAW & JPEG shots of the same scene and compare them. You’ll probably be able to decide quickly for yourself if it’s something worth bothering with.
A mate of mine only shoots RAW, but for me I really don’t think it’s worth it.

RAW is the, well, raw data from your camera’s sensor; it’s not a photograph in the strictest sense. When you squeeze the trigger and get a .JPG, this image is generated from the raw data with the camera doing a lot of ‘best guess’ work to construct the best picture it can. If the camera (or photographer) gets this wrong, your options to fix it later are limited.

RAW gives you the control to do this tweaking manually in post-processing before any compression etc has been applied, so you can fiddle with white balance and so on. The downside is that you will have to do some sort of post-processing to use your photos in any sort of sensible manner, as you can’t directly view the .RAW files as universally as you can with .JPGs. Sticking them on a website, for example, won’t work; you’d have to convert them to .JPGs (or .PNG or some such) first.

This is the professional way of doing things. Personally I hate post processing as I’m awful at it and avoid it where possible, so I shoot in .JPG day to day unless I’m doing something specifically arty that I intend on playing with later. This is generally considered in the photography world to be a bit like turning up to Glentress on a BMX, but I realised that on reflection I really don’t care. It’s my camera and I’ll shoot what I like.

If you wish to process RAW you could do far worse than get Adobe Photoshop Elements which comes with a raw editor built in.

Have to disagree with the opinions expresed on RAW thus far, only use JPG as thumbnails to view/delete then I process the kept RAW files. Prefer to use all the data that has been captured and just see processing as part of the picture taking process (like developing used to be)

Talk Photography as mentioned is a good place to start for a website

Raw is a bit like just getting the film developed and having to print in your own darkroom ( note “bit” )
Hence the post processing as above – only the darkroom is replaced by your computer – and you can do much more – you can even setup an automated post processing to do a batch of “film” a bit like the old
processing lab machines.

Many cameras have the option to save both raw and jpeg – cards are cheap now.

It all comes down to what you want to do with your photography .
You can waste a lot of time and get very frustrated in the digital darkroom – maybe concentrate on taking the pictures first .
Digital allows you to collect images very easily – but composition can suffer terminally – Try out the video on the new camera it will be great – its a really good way to help composition as during the “filming” you will have more time to evaluate what you are actually capturing – you can easily frame grab to take out individual shots – this can be very helpful when playing with action shots.

Linux has a few RAW processing tools if you dont want to splash out on software.
I tend to shoot in RAW+JPG this way i can just use the JPG for regular viewing. If i have a really good or interesting photo i want to adjust and i can use the RAW.
Yes very wasteful on space but doesnt really matter these days with the cost of storage

You can waste a lot of time and get very frustrated in the digital darkroom – maybe concentrate on taking the pictures first .

It’s only wasted time if you don’t learn anything. Developing your images will really help you to understand what you’re doing with your camera. It gives you numerous opportunities to experiment with exposure adjustments, contrast, tone, framing and composition – to name a few.

Other than storage limitations, I can not see any advantage to shooting JPG. If you’re absolutely certain that there’ll be no post-processing, then you could settle for them; otherwise, raw files are entirely superior.

Three_Fish – Member
It gives you numerous opportunities to experiment with exposure adjustments, contrast, tone, framing and composition – to name a few.

You can do that with jpeg.
Although several of those things you are better to get correct at the time of shooting anyway, before you get anywhere near a ‘digital darkroom’…

Maybe one of my new year’s tasks should be to give RAW another try….

Other than storage limitations, I can not see any advantage to shooting JPG

Convenience.

Speed. You’ll commit a bunch of burst-mode JPGs to SD a lot faster than their equivalent RAWs.

I’m not arguing that JPG is better than RAW, just so as we’re clear; just for me personally I can’t be arsed with it.

I only shoot RAW

But the benefits will be less on a bridge camera as the sensor has less dynamic range to exploit. Its main benefit will be correcting White balance issues

But you should try RAW. IMHO Lightroom is the way to go. Its processes RAW and jpg files and keeps photos organised. Try it free for a month and see how it goes

I always shoot raw. I am a long way from knowing anything but it doesn’t seem any hassle to me, I upload everything to Lightroom anyway and it just imports them and you see a photo. Then I have a few presets which I can either apply as I import them or go through and apply photo by photo. I think, maybe someone can confirm for me?, but you can get Lightroom to do an auto process which may, or may not, give you a photo without having to do any processing.

I like raw because it lets me rescue bad photos afterwards or lighten shadows and darken highlights to increase the dynamic range. Often i am dashing between deep forest and bright hillside so it lets me change the white balance more, I often find auto doesn’t get it right. That’s just what I found, I’m not an expert at all so take it with a pinch of salt. I experimented with both raw and jpeg and ended up just doing raw. If your camera has it then you should try it. Lightroom is ace and it isn’t expensive. I pay for my copy but it is worth pointing out that adobe is the most pirated software in the world, so much so that some people say it is part of their business model. I have elements as well but that is fiddly and definitely for a very small percentage of my photos.

Photo forums. Dpreview has some good stuff on there. There is also a micro four thirds forum, called micro43 I think which is a bit helpful. Lots of knowledge here as well and the photos you are proud of is a great thread, I check that a lot. Pinkbike is great too, the pods are cool and there are some photography articles up there too.

You can do that with jpeg.

I didn’t say you can’t; however JPEG images will start to degrade so quickly that the question is: why would you want to?

Excellent food for thought there, thanks.

Three Fish, when you say jpegs degrading, I presume you mean that with any sort of processing they start to degrade in a quality point of view?

Sounds like RAW is worth a play with once I’ve got some software sorted.

+1 for RAW + Lightroom

for all those “What exposure settings for taking pictures at Afan?” questions –

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/

RAW & Lightroom is generally a great combo – depends if you can be arsed post-processing though. IMO you are missing out on a big portion of the advantage of digital photography by not doing.

Three Fish, when you say jpegs degrading, I presume you mean that with any sort of processing they start to degrade in a quality point of view?

Indeed. There is so little editable information in a JPEG that noise will become apparent very quickly with any adjustment. It’s simple to test: set your camera up on a tripod and, in JPEG mode, take a picture – something indoors with low light is best for this example. Under-expose by a few stops for the purposes of experiment. Then take the daft same picture again, with all settings the same except the you take a raw image. Take the two images into developing software and increase the exposure by, say, 10 points. Observe the differences in noise, especially at the darkest and lightest ends of the dynamic range.

Interesting, I can see this becoming time consuming!
Might be worth it where i’ve pushed the ISO a bit higher to use RAW to reduce the noise a bit then.

Three Fish the difference between RAW and jpg is huge with a large sensor

It really won’t be much different on a bridge camera

But any way here is my standard RAW jpg demo

out the camera

dynamic range RAW (1 of 1) by John Clinch, on Flickr

Corrected Raw

Barton Hills 2 by John Clinch, on Flickr

same corrections applied to a jpg

dynamic range jpg (1 of 1) by John Clinch, on Flickr

Great demonstration there ampthill

Get Adobe Lightroom always shoot in RAW never look back. The photos that are worth keeping will soar!

Linux has a few RAW processing tools if you dont want to splash out on software.
I tend to shoot in RAW+JPG this way i can just use the JPG for regular viewing. If i have a really good or interesting photo i want to adjust and i can use the RAW.
Yes very wasteful on space but doesnt really matter these days with the cost of storage

same as dobo

RawTherapee is decent IMO.

If exposed well sometimes the JPG is good enough IMO and if its a special photo using this approach you also have the RAW to mess about with.

But any way here is my standard RAW jpg demo

Good stuff! I’d like to be viewing this on my computer, but even on the phone the significantly lower resolution if the JPEG is clear. The gradient in the sunlight/trees area is awful compared to the raw edit.

Give LightZone a go it’s free open source software it should handle you raw files.

The trick with lightroom isn’t that it can convert RAW files.
It’s that it’s a fantastic way to process and organise your images, that happens to remove the need for processing RAW files. You edit all images the same – raw or not.

I always found raw a complete pain when I used Adobe Camera Raw or other ‘inbetween’ RAW processing apps.

It’s that it’s a fantastic way to process and organise your images, that happens to remove the need for processing RAW files. You edit all images the same – raw or not.

I always found raw a complete pain when I used Adobe Camera Raw or other ‘inbetween’ RAW processing apps.

Very confused by your statement, LR uses a more fully featured version of Camera Raw and why would you want to to edit all images the same?

Yes you can just use presets, but they are not always suitable for individual images

Maybe I have just misunderstood and agree LR is excellent for organisation

Nothing to do with editing images in the same style. Just the same interface regardless of raw or not.

What I meant was when using LR, RAW is no longer an additional process or even an additional thought.