Why raw is better than jpg (photo recovery)

Usuqa · **Joined:** Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:51 pm **Posts:** 209

Here is a photo i took.. Its rather dark isnt it?
Well thats because my setup at the time was using a 200mm zoom with a 2x tele converter and macro lens (raynox dmc 250) and f22 or so.

So really there wasn't much chance for any light to enter the camera at all, so i was using my new sigma flash off camera (using my gx10's flash to trigger it) but the flash didn't fire as the light didn't reach the flash's sensor.

So anyway the photo was ment to be a macro of a bee flying, i was at around 150mm (including crop factor) with the macro lens attached (its 6x diopter if thats any help). I had the bee hovering just above the flower and it looked wonderful on my viewfinder. DAMIT!! why didn't it work

. But anyway theres no need for me to try describe the photo because....

here it is!. I know its not perfect, theres noise.. loss of alot of detail.. colors are a little out of whack blabla but its there.. i managed to some how get to see although not the way it should be the wonderful shot i tried to capture.

So how did i do it? well because it was a raw file and it was iso100 the gx10(k10d) seems to capture but not always display without tweaking alot of detail in the shadow areas. I boosted the image by about 3.6EV, added some fill light messed around with some other settings and used noise ninja to finally get the photo you see above.

So anyway, While i didn't get the high quality image i tried to capture i at least got a photo thanks to the wonders of RAW files and some tweaking. I guess the lesson is that one should think twice before deleting that image as there could still be a chance to make at least something from it

Scorpiuscat · **Posted:** Wed Apr 09, 2008 7:46 pm

Wow!! Most of what you said went over my head. :confused:

But that's really cool that you salvaged something.

BULL · **Posted:** Wed Apr 09, 2008 7:47 pm

My understanding of RAW, is that ALL of the data that is available to the camera at the time of the image is contained within the .RAW file.

As such, you can (should?) be able to do anything in post-processing that you (or the camera) could have done at the time of the original image.

Of course this excludes any variables not associated with the sensor, such as the various adapters you listed and any ~~mechanical~~ physical vs. digital f-stops.

Is this correct? :paranoid:

Usuqa · **Joined:** Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:51 pm **Posts:** 209

yer, the raw file is just a dump of information and isnt an image as such. It has no in camera settings applied (such as color balance, sharpness blabla) so they tend to need some post possessing applied to them, also depending on what raw converter you use can make a difference to the image also.

Its basically a digital form of negative and gives you way more control to prossess your image. It still has limitations tho but will generally give you a -1,+1 EV margin of error to play with without harming image quality. Also you can totally change the color balance of an image again without really harming the quality of the photo.

JPG on the other hand could already have clipped both the shadow and highlight area's of an image because its only an 8bit file, which means you could already have lost alot of detail that you later could have wanted to try and saved in post.

Ev for the ppl that don't know is the exposure value, its basicly just a combination of settings on the camera to capture so much light. Generally a setting of +1 ev is the equivalent of 2x more light.

CraigV · **Posted:** Mon Apr 28, 2008 6:52 pm

Scorpiuscat wrote:

Wow!! Most of what you said went over my head. :confused:

But that's really cool that you salvaged something.

It means that when you start out with Picture A, you can salvage the original image, and with a few mouse clicks, produce Picture B

BULL · **Posted:** Mon Apr 26, 2010 4:04 pm

I'm guessing that someone spammed this thread causing it to show up in my email which is all well and good (not really...), but what gets me is that I had to look at picture "A" again, and while picture "B" is really, really nice, it in no way makes up for picture "A"... :evil:

Why raw is better than jpg (photo recovery)

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