Photography - sooting file format opinion

Marc_C

Active member
Now that I have a camera* that can save in multiple formats, I'm curious what others are doing. Do you just shoot JPEG, just RAW, or save both? Regarding JPEG: normal, medium, or fine (ie: increasing in lossless-ness but increasing file size).

Yes, I know the heuristics:
save at the highest resolution since you can't add pixels after the fact
don't bother with RAW unless you're really going to explore what you can do with RAW - which adds the question: what is your intended use of the images? Amateur? Web viewing only? Prints? Small vs big vs huge? What if you have no idea what you eventually might do with a given image?
And a slew of others......

With Sandisk 32G type 10 cards at sub-$40 and 64G ~$55 at Costco, memory space is no longer the issue it once was. Yeah, so a RAW file takes up 22M - big deal.

Opinions?

*: relating to the other thread I started, I was able to get a factory refurb'd Nikon D5200 at a good price.
 
My workflow is primarily JPG, though I shoot raw + JPG at times for shots I think are critical events. Raw is definitely better if you actually think you'll use the benefits(but it is work & time). But the file sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than JPG making it more cumbersome despite cheap storage. Plus today's JPG processing engines are really pretty good as it is and JPG images can be manipulated in quite a few ways too.

Given the cheap storage I can't imagine why you'd ever use less than fine quality JPG. Lots of detail for cropping or printing bigger than snap sizes. I do lots of viewing on 22" monitors, print some and occasionally print as big as 10 x 20. Also put some online at full resolution for family to download and print at any size they want.

If you are doing FTO sized images, a dslr is pretty much overkill image wise though they let you get the pics with speed and fps, etc... that the p&s just can't quite match.
 
I shoot in "both" mode. On the rare occasion I manage to shoot something I want to do any more manipulation than basic cropping, I use Photoshop on the raw image.
 
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