Shooting in RAW

[Toby]

Ok it's that age-old question, do you shoot in RAW?

Whilst some say only the "pros" need RAW, I've always tended to think that the ability it provides for "saving" some over or underexposed shots is also of serious use to us "noobs" :)

As I tend to be the type of person who takes their camera to specific events rather than walk around with it all the time, when I do use it a lot it's usually for a specific event for which I really don't want to lose any good shots to poor exposure, so I tend to always shoot in RAW and then sort them out with Lightroom back at base.

Only problem of course is that RAW eats memory cards for breakfast, even more so now with the 40D over the 400D. As I don't have a laptop to offload stuff onto each night, when I'm away from base for a few days or more, memory card capacity starts to become an issue and it's then that I start wondering whether to just shoot in JPEG and be done with it.

Thoughts?

[Dee]

When I was a total beginner, I shot all JPEG.

When I was finding my feet slightly, I shot in JPEG and RAW.

Now I am a fully fledged professional (ok, just better than I was ;)), its RAW all the way.

I personally dont see the point in shooting in JPEG anymore, I have so much more control over my shots when I process them in RAW, although I always try and get the exposure right in camera before I shoot, I dont like to rely on it too much :)

[Matblack]

Won't shoot in anything other than RAW every again, if you want any flexibility in PP then RAW is the only solution :)

MB

[divine]

I used Jpeg for about a week at most when I first got mine, then switched to RAW and haven't looked back since.

I use RAW+Jpeg if I might need the Jpegs for some reason, like copying to someone elses laptop who don't have any RAW editing programs installed.

[Joe 90]

RAW. w1n.

[Matblack]

Your hemorrhaging memory cards on TP anyway Toby, surely the 16Gb held plenty of shots?

MB

[Toby]

Too damned slow - bought it as it was a bargain for the size but "133x" my arse! It's less than half the speed of my Extreme IIIs.

Basically I've got 16GB of Extreme IIIs with another 16GB on the way. In RAW on the 40D I'm looking at around 70 shots per gigabyte so that gives me 2240 shots before I'm full. Ought to be enough but I'm sure I'm gonna run out on a holiday trip sooner rather than later.

Off to Le Mans in June for a full five days and I'm worried I'm going to run out of space. Don't know whether to spend even more on memory cards or save towards a laptop/netbook. Might see if I can borrow one from work.

As I revived in a thread on TP this morning, I can't believe no-one does a simple USB 2.0 bridge device which can literally shovel data from one device to another. I could then plug my USB CF reader into it and a standard external USB hard drive and offload the cards to the drive. Belkin used to do such a device called the "USB Anywhere" but it's been discontinued and was only USB 1.0 which would be rather painful when unloading a 16GB card.

[Mark]

I've tried so many other SDHC cards - Class 4, Class 6, whatever. None - not a single one - even gets close to Extreme III speed. Indeed I've found that the Extreme IIIs are the only cards that beat the buffer on my S3IS, so I dread to think about RAW performance.

Extreme III all the way, price be dammned.

Back on topic, I thought the whole point of having RAW was more flexibility. Why on earth would anyone shoot JPEG only out of choice (lack of memory excepted).

[Matblack]

JPEG will pre-apply some processing and the shots will look good out of the camera most of the time, RAWs however tend to need a quick spruce in a post processing program to make them look good to the eye, things like sharpening, saturation and contrast are left to the user to tweak.

MB

[Mark]

True - hadn't really thought that statement through. There are uses - if you don't have time, or if it's a throwaway shot (I quite often take a photo of my gas meter to get the reading from it - no point at all shooting that RAW as the picture is used for all of about 10 seconds).

[Davey_Pitch]

I used to shoot RAW+JPEG when I first got my 450D, but I ended up moving to just RAW to get extra pictures on the card and for the extra flexibility in PP. When I go away in the summer I'm taking my laptop with me anyway so I can transfer the pictures to it at the end of each day, and I'll make sure I get another 2x8GB SD cards so I should be able to shoot roughly 1000 pictures per day without having to worry about space.

[Toby]

Can anyone recommend a good RAW file viewer that would let me quickly scan through capture images? Not sure the lappy is up to running Lightroom

[Mark]

Can't recommend because I haven't used it, but I've seen it mentioned a fair few times...

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

[Toby]

That'll do the job, ta very much :)

[lostkat]

I've only ever shot in RAW apart from the first week or so when I got the 300D. I moved to RAW+JPG for a bit when I got the 30D, but I never used the JPGs and it was a waste of precious memory so I went back to RAW only.

[Toby]

Well I've now got 4 x 4GB Extreme III cards with another 16GB card on the way so that gives me about 2200 shots in RAW only plus I've now blagged a lappy to offload stuff on to overnight when away from home so should be ok :)

[Matblack]

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0854

Mmmmm interesting :)

ahhh thats not what I thought it was, Maplin had a cheap unit which transfered CF to HD which would be great to traveling

MB

[Mark]

If I'm interpreting that correctly, it might do that. It's a bit non-obvious though.

[divine]

"SATA <==> CF <==> IDE file/data transfer" sounds like it can directly do SATA to CF and vice versa but it's not exactly crystal clear.

[Toby]

Unfortunately it just looks like an external USB adapter for CF cards or hard drives, i.e. the type that needs to be connected to a USB host such as a laptop.

As for devices which can copy a CF card directly to a hard drive, no-one seems to do them. There used to be a couple around a while back but they were USB1 only which would be beyond painful.

[Mark]

D'oh. It just clicked. I know exactly what you mean.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/digital_wallet.html

I've got one. Got it 2nd hand for very cheap and in the end it didn't do what I needed.

I'm sure it is USB 1.1, and the batteries are dead. If you want it, you can have it for postage (assuming I can find the power supply). No use to me now.