Asian in a Strange Land

Until I started looking into Olympus’s cameras I didn’t know who Kirk Tuck was (embarrassingly enough since I own one of the books he’s written), but I’ve come to enjoy reading his blog The Visual Science Lab.  He’s a very accomplished photographer and a good blogger, but I’ve got to pick on him for his recent article “Practice makes competent. Plus some Sunday observations.” It’s not obvious from the title of the post, but in it he talks about his preference for Olympus despite many rational reasons for choosing other brands for professional work (I can identify.  There’s more to photography than noise measurements and resolution charts.), and he also talks about shooting RAW vs. JPEG. He comes down on the side of shooting JPEG, which in and of itself isn’t controversial or surprising.  After all, he’s a pro shooter and probably shoots a high volume of shots which he’d rather get right in camera and not have to mess with.  “Kill it and Bill it,” is the motto he lives by, which makes sense.  However, I disagree with his further reasoning and his general attitude toward RAW.  I’m quoting the 3 relevant paragraphs here below, but feel free to read the full post as well to put the quote in context:

I had coffee the other day with an old friend and he was talking about the Will Crockett, “Kill it and Bill it” philosophy. In a nutshell it goes something like this: With a good light meter, good work habits and well profiled cameras and assorted support gear you should be able to nail your images in Jpeg such that they need NO adjustment or post processing. No butt time. No layers and layers of adjustment and plug in massage.

I think he’s right. Sure, if I was photographing the landing of Alien Beings in quickly changing light at Opray’s wedding on assignment for National Geographic Magazine I’d probably hedge my bets and shoot in Raw. But for most of the stuff we shoot SHQ or highest quality Jpeg seems to be pretty fabulous. After hearing about this I’ve embraced it as a bit of a challenge and I’m getting a lot more careful about using and assessing my incident meter as well as shooting tests while tethered so I can have a much better idea of what the screen on the back of the camera is telling me as related to the image on the calibrated studio monitor. Even if I revert to shooting RAW I’d like to think that the practice will make the raw conversion process quicker and more effective. And even in raw lack of perfect exposure exacts a penalty. Always.

In a roundabout way I consider highest res Jpeg the “real” professional’s format. Anyone can shoot sloppy raw and fix stuff. In a way it’s like the old slide film versus negative film argument. The lab was the raw converter for the negative film. Interesting that the newest cameras give an unequalled amount of feedback, information and control and yet we feel constrained to hedge our bets even more. Where is the sense of challenge? Of mastery? Ultimately, where is the sense of control?

“Where is the sense of control?”  It’s no wonder he doesn’t shoot RAW, because he hasn’t reaped any benefits from it.  There is not just a sense of control, but real control in RAW compared to JPEG.  Shooting RAW is never an excuse for shooting sloppy.  But sometimes you are shooting in light conditions where JPEG won’t be able to cope, namely in high dynamic range scenes where the brightest and the darkest elements are very far apart in terms of light levels.  Judging from Kirk Tuck’s work I reckon that’s not often an issue for him with his carefully controlled studio lighting.  The problem is that not all of us have the luxury of shooting this way.  Take for instance this shot I took:

Before applying graduated filter to sky

Ok, it’s not the pinnacle of art, but it achieves the purposes of documenting a worthy cause (March for Babies) and gets across the sense of community and unity felt by everybody involved with Team “Magdalena’s Feet” as visually represented by the sea of blue.  In this case it’s also helpful to illustrate when RAW is advantageous and no amount of “getting it right in the camera” with JPEG can possibly compare to the results in RAW.

I took this in RAW and adjusted a few things like contrast, saturation, etc. in Lightroom 2.3.  In the final version I’ve also applied a graduated filter to the sky to recover some of the detail there, but in this “before” version I’ve backed out that change to show what it looks like before the graduated filter.  Notice that the sky is almost completely white–blown out.  The rest of the image is properly exposed, and since the subject is the people and not the sky then doubly so, but that blown out sky is ugly.  You’ll also notice the tops of the white tents blend into the sky to the point where you wouldn’t know what shape they were from the picture if you didn’t already know from your own experience.  I could’ve lowered the exposure to save the detail in the sky but then the people would be too dark, which would’ve been the wrong exposure for the scene just for the sake of saving the sky.

From this version I exported to JPEG, then applied a graduated filter with -0.7 EV exposure to the sky to recover some of the blown out detail:

After graduated filter on JPEG

And here’s the RAW version with graduated filter applied:

After graduated filter on RAW

The difference is obvious.  In the JPEG version I was able to salvage some tent and cloud detail, but a lot of the sky to the right is a uniform shade of gray.  In the RAW version you can see a lot more cloud detail and the tent tops are more or less well defined.  Trust me when I say that as visible as the differences are at 990 x 660 pixels on a webpage, it’s even more striking in the full resolution versions viewed large.  Viewed even at full screen size (26″ 1920 x 1200 LCD) I can see posterization occurring in the JPEG version in what looks like uniform gray in the web-sized version.  This looks like horizontal bands of very slightly varied shades of gray, which doesn’t occur in the RAW version.  I’m sure it looks even uglier at pixel-peeping, 100% zoom view, but there’s no need for that.  I’ve proven my point even at web size.

RAW has more dynamic range headroom, period.  It can store more highlight and shadow detail than it shows in any given image, and thus stores more data in the extremes than JPEG.  This makes it superior in situations where you can’t carefully control the dynamic range of the scene and you just have to shoot as right as possible and try to bring out some of the lost highlight/shadow detail in post processing.

RAW is also more malleable whereas JPEG is more brittle.  That is, you can twist and manipulate RAW a lot more before image quality starts falling apart like the posterization in the JPEG version of this shot.

Congratulations to Kirk Tuck and any photographers out there who can always manipulate away high dynamic range scenes through carefully controlled artificial lighting.  I do that when I can too, but that’s just not going to happen in some cases.  For this shot I would’ve had to setup a few strobes and move them around and adjust them for each shot as I go from wide to telephoto, far out to close in, etc.  Not gonna happen.

So again I completely understand why Kirk Tuck would say JPEG is enough if he doesn’t have to do this kind of post processing on his images.  What I can’t understand is why he can’t see how it would be beneficial to others who have different shooting parameters compared to his.  The only scenario he can imagine where RAW would be beneficial is where you might get the exposure wrong and need to “hedge your bets” in case you do.  I think I’ve shown there are situations where you can get the exposure exactly bang-on correct but still need to do some post-processing manipulation to get the best out of the image.  Does a bit more detail in the sky make or break the shot I posted?  No.  But it makes it better, and nobody should have a problem with that.

To me RAW vs. JPEG isn’t so much negatives vs. slides, but rather developing your own film vs. sending your film off to be developed by somebody else.  In the former you have complete control of how your negatives turn out, and in the latter you use somebody who you can trust to be consistent and you shoot to get the best results out of their processing method.  There’s certainly room for both, and some of the great photographers never/seldom bothered to develop their own film, for instance Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand.  But other great photographers took great delight in tweaking every aspect of film development and print making, dodging and burning where needed, etc., for instance Ansel Adams.  Ironically enough for somebody espousing the virtues of RAW, I highly admire the work of Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand.  But maybe it’s not so ironic.  After all, my point is that you can be a great photographer independent of what processing method you choose.

There’s room for both RAW and JPEG shooters in this world, and there are clear benefits to both.  To dismiss one or the other as not having merit is a bad case of thinking inside the box.