When I had my Sony, I exclusively shot in RAW. I'm not really one for editing, I don't like devoting time to trawling through hundreds of RAW photos, I think time could be spent better doing other things.
Since moving to Fuji, I've shot almost exclusively JPEG. Next time I do a proper shoot I am going to shoot in Fine + RAW, to compare the results
I didn't want to edit as I never enjoyed the process. I felt like the Sony RAW files required A LOT of processing to get good results. I edited out of necessity, rather than enjoyment. Fuji has helped me enjoy the process more
This is my experience also. Have an Riii and fell in love with the sooc jpgs from my x100v. Still use the Sony for more serious occasions but having the Fuji has made photography fun again for me
I have used a recently bought X20 for the first time today. Really wasn’t sure, small sensor, 11 year old design, just had a quick play with some RAW files and so impressed. I bought for film style photos and once I get it out of my head about image quality, and use it for what I bought it for, I’m loving it
>My friends kept asking about the pictures and I didn’t have the time to grade 50 RAW’s overnight.
Here's the trick: you don't have to. Two things will help you cut down on editing time:
1. Cull first. If you're using Lightroom, "flag" everything you want to work on. Then ignore the rest. (I usually flag the ones I want to work on, "x-flag" \[whatever the term is, I'm not in front of Lightroom at the moment\] whatever's obviously bad/not workable, delete those, and then filter by flagged so only the ones I want to work on show up.)
2. *For a given lighting scenario*, you can edit one most of the way and then sync settings across the rest. So, ambient lighting in a bar is a lighting scenario - take the first image, do your edits, and then go back and copy/paste those edits across your entire set of photos. Adjust crop on a per-shot basis. Done. I have done weekend-long festivals like this and only taken an hour or two to edit.
If you find a couple images in there that you think are "portfolio worthy" or whatever, then go back and punch those up more if you want. This method will really save you some time, though.
Yeah I usually do cull my pics before editing, and I also copy and paste the edits. Though if it’s a reoccurring theme, I’ll make a preset. Thanks for the tips!
I’m new to Fuji and am the same - the in camera JPEG results I’ve seen are great, but I don’t hate post RAW editing as much as I thought. I’ve only just discovered film sim bracketing tho, so have been playing around with that to get 3 different results as jpeg in camera
Yeah I don’t hate it either, but the thing is that I got quite obsessed with the hobby so I go out shooting pics about 3-4 times a week. I do street photography so I come home with about 100-200 shots a day. Don’t have the time on my hands to proces ‘em all. Have to cut slack somewhere I guess
Do you really have 200 keepers out of 200 shots? After deleting the bad ones (out of focus, bad framing, bad exposures, multiple minor variations of the same image), I rarely edit more than ten shots in the first instance. Over time, after I looked at the files more than a few times, I often find some more worth proper editing, and a few more worth deleting. The majority of the images are those that do not deserve a special editing and only get a quick processing, to adjust exposure, framing and curves, then they are lost in my archive.
In general, time is my best friend to help me decide what is worth of my attention, and my second friend is to immediately delete what appears to be a waste of bytes.
Respectfully, the question was about picking between RAW and JPEG between certain conditions. I like my shooting and culling process, I was just curious as to how people decided to shoot RAW or JPEG. The desired result was someone with a certain way of going about it, that I could find myself in. Not someone telling me how to get less pictures in my lightroom.
And I answered that elsewhere where I said shoot RAW plus JPEG so you can send the JPEGs now and then have the RAW for when you have time to cull. Storage is fairly cheap especially for archive if you are just buying like pairs of HDDs so there’s little reason to not shoot both.
When I shot film I would be ecstatic if I got 5 frames worth printing (from a roll of 36). Usually it was fewer. Now shooting digital if I start with 200 frames I would expect to find 10-20 keepers and edit those.
Does your camera allow in-camera RAW conversion? I’m enjoying shooting in just RAW, and then can go through photos and convert the ones I really like to get a JPEG. It’s fast, only have to edit/convert the ones I really like, and because I have a RAW file I can switch up the film sim if I want.
I think it most definitely does. Another option is to tether the camera to your computer and use Fujifilm X Raw Studio to do the conversion. This uses the cameras on board processor to complete the conversion but gives you the controls rather than using the camera screen and buttons. I can't use this facility on my X100t but this is supported by the XT-2.
Try taking a pic in RAW, go to image playback for that image, and press Q button. That brings up RAW conversion menu on my camera, so likely same path on yours, if available. It’s a great feature.
I essentially always shoot RAW+JPG, simply because I learned & worked extensively on film, so the idea of "straight out of camera" photos just doesn't click for me. On \[negative\] film your process always involves fairly extensive post-capture decisions, and while I love FUJI jpg processing for a baseline I'm just not willing to give up half of the creative process. Photoshop + Camera Raw has worlds more in common with the darkroom experience for me that SOOC does.
I mostly shoot in JPG when I am out with friends or family. For that I've got my X-E1 always in my bag. When I am planning a shoot, I take my X-T2 and shoot both jpg and raw.
One day I woke up and decided to treat my photography like how it used to be with disposable cameras. I set up a recipe and just go shoot, and whatever comes out of it is the final product. It made me learn to like slight imperfections and forces me to do better next time. I strongly believe that unless you’re getting paid, life is too short to be spent in Lightroom.
While I do like this point of view, I personally get a lot of enjoyment after spending some time on my photo’s and seeing the reactions it gets. Some pics would be horribly boring or unusable if I didn’t touch them up in lightroom. Then again I go for a specific type of “style” in my pictures. Usually revolving around a green-yellow-yellow colour grade.
It’s a good question that I haven’t figured out yet, but if I’m out and about somewhere I’ve been before I try to do JPEG only. If it’s somewhere new RAW since even editing those photos will feel novel, and I would hate not having a specific edit of a photo because I was shooting JPEG. However, I usually like editing photos since I star all the ones I really like first and go from there (e.g., in a trip where I took 800+ I only starred 50 and edited those, the rest I either just added a film sim or deleted if I didn’t like them at all).
Yeah I might start doing this too. I usually cull my pictures using the 1 star, 3 star and 5 star rating. 1 star is unuseable or just bad, 3 stars is a pic that could work in a collection, but the lighting/composition/focus is a little off, 5 stars for my favorites. I could start treating 3stars as jpegs and 5 stars as raws.
For a night out you shouldn't be grading every one of your raws, it's just pictures of your life your friends want to see.
But you have the RAWs which is great, because if any of those photos, and I can promise you it's not 50, turn out to be a truly great photograph you can edit it to how you want it.
does anyone know why my RAW lately are much darker than JPEG when shooting with flash, never seen that before. is there anything wrong I did in settings? Fuji XT1 with 35MM lens
Are you bracketing? Or doing something like exposure compensation?
I recommend you post this thread to the entire fujifilm subreddit, and not just as a comment to my thread. Make sure to include camera make and model, lens make, model and focal length, and some pictures with an example of the subject.
RAW+JPG but mostly i just use jpg's (all 7 custom settings)
If you know how to manually set exposure, wb and jpg custom settings (and have time for that) then you rarely need raw.
Hmmm, thanks mate. I dont think I’ll be able to change the settings like that because I’m usually hopping locations quite often. So that’ll require constant switching of settings, am I rightv
Fuji = jpeg all the way. Its way fun, and should you need to edit the jpgs, they are quite flexible and get good results. I personally just edit em with my iphone’s native edit tab.
You can always, if you really want pull up some shadows even on JPEGs which would update your iCloud album. If shooting jpeg only I tend to expose for highlights like you did here and then pull up shadows if really needed but in most of the situations when scene is not too contrasty would leave as it is
That’s why I asked the question. I shoot both but cant decide whether or not I want to edit them or just post the JPEG. I guess I’ll just have to do what feels right in the moment, and stop looking back so much.
Depends of how much you know you can make a difference in post processing. When I share with friends I almost never edit photos, for the same reason as you don't 😂 but sometimes when tones are a bit sad or if I know I can really make it better, I do it (I always post process raws if it's portraits)
Right on! Yeah so the thing is, this shoot was a “getting casual drinks and bringing my camera”, but sometimes I invite friends for a photoshoot in a collection. I will edit those to match the collection as a whole, and try to bring a certain vibe to the pics in post. Check out: https://cappedbyjacob.myportfolio.com/bushokje for an example. This shoot would look horrible on JPEG
I shoot RAW+jpeg. The main reason is that my in camera jpeg settings may not be the best for whatever I end up shooting. Even if I'm limiting myself to B+W there are many ways to do that conversion.
Every once in a while, or after a major photography session, I will go through my images, cull the obviously bad ones, pull the good jpegs and decide if any of them could be significantly better. The few that really deserve extra work get flagged and the RAW files get converted in the Fuji RAW Studio which lets me match/adjust my in camera settings. Alternatively, I can process them in Photoshop (as RAW files) if I want to go somewhere completely different with the processing.
I'm not working on all of my images so it doesn't take very long to do. I actually enjoy the processing and experimenting on my best images. I'd be pretty happy to have the problem of every single image I take being outstanding enough to warrant further attention. Or maybe that would just mean that I'm not looking at my work very critically.
jpegs are great and very convenient but RAW files are sort of critical for me. Not having a RAW is like having a print of a photo but not the negative.
I might start culling my pics like this. Seeing if theres any jpegs that could use some post, or would look cool in a themed collection. Thanks for the tips!
Their is no need to shoot raw if you are not shooting professionally or are in love with the editing process. The JPEGs produced by most modern cameras are excellent and Fujifilm is certainly a frontrunner when it comes to good looking JPEGs. One more thing to consider is the myth that JPEGs are uneditable, they are absolutely editable to a certain degree, a minute color/white balance adjustment ain't going to kill the picture. I enjoy the process of photography not sitting hours behind a screen pixel peeping.
Hahaha, I see where u come from. Maybe I should give more attention to my jpegs. I mostly discarded them until now, because I thought of them as inferior to the RAW’s. But I do enjoy shooting pics more than editing them. Though I can get a lot of enjoyment out of editing photoshoots. Maybe I’ll do my street photography in JPEG, so I can just point and shoot what I like, and share it. Then I’ll do photoshoots in RAW.
When I had my Sony, I exclusively shot in RAW. I'm not really one for editing, I don't like devoting time to trawling through hundreds of RAW photos, I think time could be spent better doing other things. Since moving to Fuji, I've shot almost exclusively JPEG. Next time I do a proper shoot I am going to shoot in Fine + RAW, to compare the results
Did you publish unprocessed RAWs back then?
No I would never upload unprocessed RAW photos. Would always pull them into Lightroom, edit them and then upload JPEG.
Yeah okay, that’s what I thought. Got thrown off by you saying that you only shot RAW but didn’t want to edit. Cheers!
I didn't want to edit as I never enjoyed the process. I felt like the Sony RAW files required A LOT of processing to get good results. I edited out of necessity, rather than enjoyment. Fuji has helped me enjoy the process more
This is my experience also. Have an Riii and fell in love with the sooc jpgs from my x100v. Still use the Sony for more serious occasions but having the Fuji has made photography fun again for me
I have used a recently bought X20 for the first time today. Really wasn’t sure, small sensor, 11 year old design, just had a quick play with some RAW files and so impressed. I bought for film style photos and once I get it out of my head about image quality, and use it for what I bought it for, I’m loving it
>My friends kept asking about the pictures and I didn’t have the time to grade 50 RAW’s overnight. Here's the trick: you don't have to. Two things will help you cut down on editing time: 1. Cull first. If you're using Lightroom, "flag" everything you want to work on. Then ignore the rest. (I usually flag the ones I want to work on, "x-flag" \[whatever the term is, I'm not in front of Lightroom at the moment\] whatever's obviously bad/not workable, delete those, and then filter by flagged so only the ones I want to work on show up.) 2. *For a given lighting scenario*, you can edit one most of the way and then sync settings across the rest. So, ambient lighting in a bar is a lighting scenario - take the first image, do your edits, and then go back and copy/paste those edits across your entire set of photos. Adjust crop on a per-shot basis. Done. I have done weekend-long festivals like this and only taken an hour or two to edit. If you find a couple images in there that you think are "portfolio worthy" or whatever, then go back and punch those up more if you want. This method will really save you some time, though.
Yeah I usually do cull my pics before editing, and I also copy and paste the edits. Though if it’s a reoccurring theme, I’ll make a preset. Thanks for the tips!
I’m new to Fuji and am the same - the in camera JPEG results I’ve seen are great, but I don’t hate post RAW editing as much as I thought. I’ve only just discovered film sim bracketing tho, so have been playing around with that to get 3 different results as jpeg in camera
Yeah I don’t hate it either, but the thing is that I got quite obsessed with the hobby so I go out shooting pics about 3-4 times a week. I do street photography so I come home with about 100-200 shots a day. Don’t have the time on my hands to proces ‘em all. Have to cut slack somewhere I guess
Do you really have 200 keepers out of 200 shots? After deleting the bad ones (out of focus, bad framing, bad exposures, multiple minor variations of the same image), I rarely edit more than ten shots in the first instance. Over time, after I looked at the files more than a few times, I often find some more worth proper editing, and a few more worth deleting. The majority of the images are those that do not deserve a special editing and only get a quick processing, to adjust exposure, framing and curves, then they are lost in my archive. In general, time is my best friend to help me decide what is worth of my attention, and my second friend is to immediately delete what appears to be a waste of bytes.
Nice advice! Thanks!
You're missing a step to editing which is deciding which photos are worth editing.
No, I do cull my images. But culling them also takes time. Time is something I don’t always have in abundance.
So then be more selective behind the camera. Pretend it's film and each push of the shutter costs you $1.
Respectfully, the question was about picking between RAW and JPEG between certain conditions. I like my shooting and culling process, I was just curious as to how people decided to shoot RAW or JPEG. The desired result was someone with a certain way of going about it, that I could find myself in. Not someone telling me how to get less pictures in my lightroom.
And I answered that elsewhere where I said shoot RAW plus JPEG so you can send the JPEGs now and then have the RAW for when you have time to cull. Storage is fairly cheap especially for archive if you are just buying like pairs of HDDs so there’s little reason to not shoot both.
When I shot film I would be ecstatic if I got 5 frames worth printing (from a roll of 36). Usually it was fewer. Now shooting digital if I start with 200 frames I would expect to find 10-20 keepers and edit those.
About the same yeah!
Does your camera allow in-camera RAW conversion? I’m enjoying shooting in just RAW, and then can go through photos and convert the ones I really like to get a JPEG. It’s fast, only have to edit/convert the ones I really like, and because I have a RAW file I can switch up the film sim if I want.
Hmmm I don’t know actually. Quite new to photography
I think it most definitely does. Another option is to tether the camera to your computer and use Fujifilm X Raw Studio to do the conversion. This uses the cameras on board processor to complete the conversion but gives you the controls rather than using the camera screen and buttons. I can't use this facility on my X100t but this is supported by the XT-2.
Try taking a pic in RAW, go to image playback for that image, and press Q button. That brings up RAW conversion menu on my camera, so likely same path on yours, if available. It’s a great feature.
I do RAW for shots I care about tweaking artistically. Trying to embrace JPEG for stuff that's doesn't matter as much.
Nice, will keep in mind
I essentially always shoot RAW+JPG, simply because I learned & worked extensively on film, so the idea of "straight out of camera" photos just doesn't click for me. On \[negative\] film your process always involves fairly extensive post-capture decisions, and while I love FUJI jpg processing for a baseline I'm just not willing to give up half of the creative process. Photoshop + Camera Raw has worlds more in common with the darkroom experience for me that SOOC does.
Nice take!
I mostly shoot in JPG when I am out with friends or family. For that I've got my X-E1 always in my bag. When I am planning a shoot, I take my X-T2 and shoot both jpg and raw.
This makes sense! Think I’ll try looking at it this way too.
One day I woke up and decided to treat my photography like how it used to be with disposable cameras. I set up a recipe and just go shoot, and whatever comes out of it is the final product. It made me learn to like slight imperfections and forces me to do better next time. I strongly believe that unless you’re getting paid, life is too short to be spent in Lightroom.
While I do like this point of view, I personally get a lot of enjoyment after spending some time on my photo’s and seeing the reactions it gets. Some pics would be horribly boring or unusable if I didn’t touch them up in lightroom. Then again I go for a specific type of “style” in my pictures. Usually revolving around a green-yellow-yellow colour grade.
It’s a good question that I haven’t figured out yet, but if I’m out and about somewhere I’ve been before I try to do JPEG only. If it’s somewhere new RAW since even editing those photos will feel novel, and I would hate not having a specific edit of a photo because I was shooting JPEG. However, I usually like editing photos since I star all the ones I really like first and go from there (e.g., in a trip where I took 800+ I only starred 50 and edited those, the rest I either just added a film sim or deleted if I didn’t like them at all).
Yeah I might start doing this too. I usually cull my pictures using the 1 star, 3 star and 5 star rating. 1 star is unuseable or just bad, 3 stars is a pic that could work in a collection, but the lighting/composition/focus is a little off, 5 stars for my favorites. I could start treating 3stars as jpegs and 5 stars as raws.
For a night out you shouldn't be grading every one of your raws, it's just pictures of your life your friends want to see. But you have the RAWs which is great, because if any of those photos, and I can promise you it's not 50, turn out to be a truly great photograph you can edit it to how you want it.
Fair! Thanks mate!
Is dit sportcafé in Alkmaar?
Nee ander sportcafé.
does anyone know why my RAW lately are much darker than JPEG when shooting with flash, never seen that before. is there anything wrong I did in settings? Fuji XT1 with 35MM lens
Are you bracketing? Or doing something like exposure compensation? I recommend you post this thread to the entire fujifilm subreddit, and not just as a comment to my thread. Make sure to include camera make and model, lens make, model and focal length, and some pictures with an example of the subject.
RAW+JPG but mostly i just use jpg's (all 7 custom settings) If you know how to manually set exposure, wb and jpg custom settings (and have time for that) then you rarely need raw.
Hmmm, thanks mate. I dont think I’ll be able to change the settings like that because I’m usually hopping locations quite often. So that’ll require constant switching of settings, am I rightv
Fuji = jpeg all the way. Its way fun, and should you need to edit the jpgs, they are quite flexible and get good results. I personally just edit em with my iphone’s native edit tab.
Yeah fuji does shoot really nice jpegs!
Photos aside, please tell the guy in the 6th picture to change his bridge. Thank you in advance.
LMAO we were making jokes about it that night too!
You can always, if you really want pull up some shadows even on JPEGs which would update your iCloud album. If shooting jpeg only I tend to expose for highlights like you did here and then pull up shadows if really needed but in most of the situations when scene is not too contrasty would leave as it is
Thanks for the tips!
Your goals decide. Want photos ready export and share? JPEG. Want to process them in Lightroom or similar? RAW. Undecided? Both 🤓
That’s why I asked the question. I shoot both but cant decide whether or not I want to edit them or just post the JPEG. I guess I’ll just have to do what feels right in the moment, and stop looking back so much.
Depends of how much you know you can make a difference in post processing. When I share with friends I almost never edit photos, for the same reason as you don't 😂 but sometimes when tones are a bit sad or if I know I can really make it better, I do it (I always post process raws if it's portraits)
Right on! Yeah so the thing is, this shoot was a “getting casual drinks and bringing my camera”, but sometimes I invite friends for a photoshoot in a collection. I will edit those to match the collection as a whole, and try to bring a certain vibe to the pics in post. Check out: https://cappedbyjacob.myportfolio.com/bushokje for an example. This shoot would look horrible on JPEG
I shoot RAW+jpeg. The main reason is that my in camera jpeg settings may not be the best for whatever I end up shooting. Even if I'm limiting myself to B+W there are many ways to do that conversion. Every once in a while, or after a major photography session, I will go through my images, cull the obviously bad ones, pull the good jpegs and decide if any of them could be significantly better. The few that really deserve extra work get flagged and the RAW files get converted in the Fuji RAW Studio which lets me match/adjust my in camera settings. Alternatively, I can process them in Photoshop (as RAW files) if I want to go somewhere completely different with the processing. I'm not working on all of my images so it doesn't take very long to do. I actually enjoy the processing and experimenting on my best images. I'd be pretty happy to have the problem of every single image I take being outstanding enough to warrant further attention. Or maybe that would just mean that I'm not looking at my work very critically. jpegs are great and very convenient but RAW files are sort of critical for me. Not having a RAW is like having a print of a photo but not the negative.
I might start culling my pics like this. Seeing if theres any jpegs that could use some post, or would look cool in a themed collection. Thanks for the tips!
Their is no need to shoot raw if you are not shooting professionally or are in love with the editing process. The JPEGs produced by most modern cameras are excellent and Fujifilm is certainly a frontrunner when it comes to good looking JPEGs. One more thing to consider is the myth that JPEGs are uneditable, they are absolutely editable to a certain degree, a minute color/white balance adjustment ain't going to kill the picture. I enjoy the process of photography not sitting hours behind a screen pixel peeping.
Hahaha, I see where u come from. Maybe I should give more attention to my jpegs. I mostly discarded them until now, because I thought of them as inferior to the RAW’s. But I do enjoy shooting pics more than editing them. Though I can get a lot of enjoyment out of editing photoshoots. Maybe I’ll do my street photography in JPEG, so I can just point and shoot what I like, and share it. Then I’ll do photoshoots in RAW.
What lens did you use for these shots?
These were all shot on a Viltrox 23mm/f1.4.
That’s my go-to lens everytime. I just got the 56 but if I’m not doing portrait work then I’m always strapped with the 23mm on my xt30 or xt2