Why JPGs Why??

This morning I was thinking about some of my recent conversations with other photographers about file types.  This is a pretty common conversation, and everyone has a bit of a different spin on the topic depending on how they have their work flow designed.  

Most of you who either know me or read my journal regularly know that I utilize and strongly favour shooting in the RAW format and then specifically convert to DNG as part of my work flow.  In brief, I love the flexibility of RAW, DNG saves me about 20% on the file size and contains all of the information in one file without requiring the need for sidecar files.  Do I ever shoot JPGs anymore? Very rarely.  The only times that I still consider shooting JPG are for sports or action photos.  That being said with buffer sizes increasing on most of the DSLR bodies, along with the on board processing power, it takes me a lot to change my file format back over to JPG.

If you are going to shoot JPG or you are using a camera that doesn’t support RAW, here are a few things to remember to ensure that you will come out with a good, consistent quality photo:

1. Maximum size and quality.  Set your camera to Large/Superfine, or whatever your brand’s top quality setting is.  Don’t be cheap, memory cards have dropped drastically in price.  Dropping your quality settings to get more pictures on the card isn’t a valid reason to not shoot at your highest quality.
2. Special “colour and settings” modes.  Read your manual carefully about these modes and understand what your camera is doing to the photo when you use these modes.  Shoot in colour and convert to sepia or black and white later on; there is no going back once in the JPG format.  Be careful that certain modes like “Landscape” or “Vivid” don’t clip your highlights, shadows or introduce unnatural colour into the photo.
3. White balance.  This is one of the most important things to be conscious of when shooting any format, but it is vital when shooting JPG.  White balance controls the colour tone of the photo and can make or break how the image looks.  
4. Colour space.  This is important when shooting in either RAW or JPG formats.  Set your camera up according to what colour space you intend on editing in.  The most common modes are Adobe 1998 and sRGB.  I would encourage you to read up about both of these, as these will affect how your images are printed or displayed on the web.

I learned my JPG lessons a long time ago, but was reminded last week when I was reviewing some older material.  Editing my five year old JPGs, showed me not only how far technology has come but how far I have come in my understanding.  Is there more work when shooting RAW?  Potentially, but there aren’t some of the same regrets as when I look back at my JPG images.  I like having the power to simply “reset.”