Is RAW worth it?

[chugmeister]

Thanks for all the good info.

 

[lamont]

- Lag time. JPG is around 1 second on average. RAW format is like 8 secs. So you sacrifice time.

i can get less than 4s on a c5050 with a transcend 45x 1GB CF card.

 

[ChillyWaters]

Thanks for all the good info.

It sucks your RAW files are so big. Mine are around 1.5MB per photo for a 3megapixel camera.

Looking at the responses, it seems most people focused on the write times and the general photo quality (lack of pixelation) of RAW. What I didn't see mentioned was the ability to do white balancing with RAW _after_ the dive.

I guess you can do manual white balancing while shooting JPEG, but you need to have a white object to focus on while underwater to set the white balance (such as a slate). With RAW, you can set the balance later, using appropriate software. I would like to see these two aspects argued about. If you don't correct the white balance, all your photos will look _terriblly_ off colour.

- ChillyWaters

 

[alcina]

I should have been clearer - yes, RAW gives better control in post processing as you are making all the decision and not letting the camera do things to your image that you don't know about or that will be hard to fix later. White balance is a dream in RAW for underwater use - no fiddling with slates and resetting the wb everytime you change positions. But WB isn't everything - shadows, exposure, saturation etc can all be controlled in the software...

 

[ssra30]

It sucks your RAW files are so big. Mine are around 1.5MB per photo for a 3megapixel camera.

Depending on the camera and how it stores RAW information, the file size is quite varied. C5050 5mp RAW is around 5-6mb, Nikon D70 6mp RAW (compressed) is 5mb, D2X 12mp is 20mb. Some algorithm is more efficient than others at writing RAW information i suppose. Sony 8mp at 16mb is huge!

Looking at the responses, it seems most people focused on the write times and the general photo quality (lack of pixelation) of RAW. What I didn't see mentioned was the ability to do white balancing with RAW _after_ the dive.

- ChillyWaters

I did in my initial post on this thread , RAW will give you the ability to bypass all automatic adjustments done by the camera, and that includes white balance adjustment. BTW pixelation on RAW and JPEG should be the same because the size of the picture is the same. It is more the loss of low level detail, highlight area etc that might be more noticeable.