TIF, JPG and RAW Forums

sallytrafic · Southern Rally Co-ordinator

Hi I have been shooting in TIF and RAW (for the first time) recently but have come up with an anomaly. When I load these into my apple there is always a JPG saved as well as each RAW or TIF and at least viewed on my 20" colour corrected screen the JPGs always seen to look better.

Is there any simple reason for this?

ksebruce

Pixelpusher

Frank....

Can you tell us what program you are using to view the images?

If your camera produces RAW+JPG then the JPG has been processed with in camera settings and might have produced an sRGB image. These tend to look good on most displays and with most printers without the need for colour management.

RAW images need to be processed in the PC/MAC and it's possible to produce an image in a much wider colour space, which unless you have a colour managed program will not look correct. However, typical RAW viewers will render the image correctly on screen at least.

Colin

Wizzo

I would stick to JPEG images. They are in a compressed form and will take up less memory than a TIFF image. I'm not familiar with RAW images but I think they are a format which can work if the original picture has been produced by an otherwise than 'normal' source. RAW seems to have issues with the way the colour and pixels are recorded and are not so easily converted.

TIFF images are generally used where the image is being reproduced for printing or similar. It retains all the original information and therefore will produce a good quality image. It will normally take a considerable amount more memory but from your point of view is pointless if all you wish to do is view on screen or print out on ink-jet. There is a compression system for TIFF images (LZW) which makes the file size smaller but loses none of the quality.

JPEG images can easily be converted to TIFF images in Photoshop if required. They are universally recognised by many programmes so have the advantage of being able to be opened by most other recipients.

To view images on screen successfully only requires a low resolution of either 72dpi or96 dpi depending on monitor (PC or MAC).

JohnW

Pixelpusher

Of course it depends on what your objectives are but in terms of image quality then RAW is better than JPEG and personally it's all I ever shoot.

It is though an age old discussion about whether or not you could tell the difference between a RAW image and good JPEG image. However, starting with RAW is going to give the highest image quality at the beginning. You also have control how the image is processed rather than what the camera thinks it should be and there are some things you can do with RAW that you just can't with JPEGs since you have more data to play with.

One key fact about RAW images is that processing them is non-destructive. It's like always having your negative to go back to which you can then print/view in many different ways.

By the way Digital Images don't have a resolution in DPI or PPI - they are just a number of Pixels.

Colin

ronin56

sallytrafic · Southern Rally Co-ordinator

EJB

Just a comment:-
The info I gather from the various image sites I frequent is generally that Pro's use RAW because of the amount of data it contains.
Most amateurs who buy the latest dSLR's with a RAW ability tend to shoot RAW at first because it's 'better'!
After a short and normally frustrating period of time they then revert to JPEG because even with the correct manipulation they coudn't tell the difference in all normal situations! Smile

Pixelpusher

Frank....

I'm a PC person so I'm not at all familiar with iPhoto but I do know Elements and that it doesn't come with the Organiser function on the Mac - using iPhoto instead. And that's exhausted my Mac knowledge.

Within Elements you should set it to manage colours, so go into Edit > Colour Settings and choose either Optimise for Screen or Print. Earlier versions had some different wording but the key thing is NOT to choose the NO Colour Management option.

I don't know if iPhoto has anything similar.

Washed out or flat looking images often result from not having Colour Management turned on and a colour space other than sRGB - I can't say for sure that, that's what you have though.

Can you indicate the colour space your images are in?
What are you using to process the RAW images?

Colin