Finally, a video that actually explains how you should actually process RAW files . The raw to tiff to 3rd party workflow is truly the best way when you have time to deliver. great video!
One more thing Jack, I really appreciate your final comments re using JPG shots after sorting events. I’m right there…. the girls(soccer) are so used to immediate results, that the JPG shots get uploaded to the file sharing right away. I do keep some NEFs, but time is everything, as you do correctly pointed out.
Hi Jack! Great approach! I've seen hundreds of videos, as I have been working my way (hopefully) up into Sports Photography. Pretty average and humble photographer and this is to say that I've earn (at least) the capability of filtering bad content! I'm in no position to critique, but this is definitely a great channel, from someone that knows the business truly. Thank You and, of course, the least that I could do was to subscribe and looking forward for future videos...still a lot to catch up from your library!!! Cheers
I photograph my small town's club and college sports each weekend. One reason I always shoot in jpeg, is because of the extra time taken to edit a raw file. My images are only posted on my face book sports page and shared to the club/school's fb pages. People may only look at an image a few times and by Tuesday evening the players/parents etc are already tuned in to the next weekend's game. For my circumstance, editing 50 images from a college rugby game, or 170 images from a pony club day would be a nightmare to edit in raw. I do this as a retirement hobby, it is not a source of income.
I’m a sports photographer who hates JPEG. But I shoot JPEG. I am aware that it is a 20+ year old file format that is well past its expiration date. But it has become the standard. It is good to see that as mirrorless cameras progress, more are making HEIF and HEIC File formats available. These are compressed and processed but retain dramatically more information, smaller file size and have a broader color range than JPEG’s. This is a great video. Thank you for producing it. Hopefully in a few years this won’t be an issue anymore.
Great video Jack. Would really be interesting to see a deeper comparison between NX Studio and LR, especially with a workflow of exporting from NX to Topaz Denoise and such.
I think it's important to remember many of the "RAW is superior 100%" of the time arguments come from people who came to that conclusion with gear from 15 years ago. In camera JPGs have improved a great deal since then. You also hear people like Peter Read Miller state they only shoot RAW because that's what the team of professional editors he sends his pics to want. Great, but I don't have that team, and again, that team formed up 10+ years ago.
I think it's important to know how to edit RAW properly, because it certainly has its uses. However, to advocate that JPEG has no value or that RAW is the end-all and be-all is short-sighted, or as you said, based on a select group of employers or customers.
@@JackBeasleyMedia I agree that it's silly to try and claim that JPGs are useless. When I shoot auto races, I often have to transmit images from trackside via Wi-Fi and FTP. Clients cannot handle RAW images and the size of them is also a barrier.
Excellent flog Jack, I was out yesterday with my D6 photographing some cricket, used Jpeg fine, and was so pleased with the files, I'm going to get the Nikon software as it looks pretty good.
I don't understand the comparison of applying the same transformations to the NEF and the JPG in parallel. I assume that the reason that the JPG looks "better" out of the gate is that you're using High ISO NR in-camera that has already been applied to the JPG. The RAW image has no NR applied from the start, so it makes perfect sense that the JPG will look "better" when you look at it initially (likely also due to in-camera sharpening being applied). If you want a better comparison, then apply some NR in Lightroom to the RAW image as well as some sharpening in order to apply the same treatment that the JPG got in-camera before you ingested it into Lightroom. As for applying "auto" to the image, "auto" setting normally follow the 80/20 rule. "Auto" algorithms normally work when applied to an "average" image in terms of brightness, contrast and color. When you apply it to an image that is at one extreme or another, the results often go off of the rails. For example, if you apply "auto" to a black cat sitting on a coal pile at night or a snowman in a blizzard, you're going to get funky results because the software is going to "center" the results in terms of brightness, etc.. The same goes for night football where most of the pixels will be overly dark and "auto" will try and make the whole image look like it wasn't taken at night. My personal experience is that high ISO images are where RAW shines when compared to JPGs. Particularly when it comes to recovering shadow details. I shoot tons of ice hockey and am starting to get back into football. With players wearing helmets and players with darker skin tones, you often have to fight some shadows on their faces. The same is true when a player's face is in the shadow of another player. I've found that with RAW images it's generally easier to make the player's faces look brighter and sharper without turning the facial skins details to mush.
I would agree that RAWs retain more details in those high ISO situations. I guess it comes down to what you want to emphasize - more detail but more grain, or less grain but less detail. I tend to go to the less grain side of the fence.
@@JackBeasleyMedia Jack, I hope I'm not coming off as a contrarian, but there's no reason that you have to make that trade-off with RAW images. The out-of-camera JPG starts out as a "RAW image" too, but becomes a JPG after the Nikon firmware applies the "post-processing" (NR, sharpening, saturation, compression, etc.). The only real difference is if you want Nikon (guided by the settings you use in Picture Control) to apply the post-processing for you when it renders the JPG, or if you can do control it yourself in Lightroom. I prefer to do it in post myself because Lightroom offers you many more controls and because Nikon applies changes with a broad brush to the entire image (for example, I prefer to use unsharp masking in LR to limit sharpening-related detail loss). This also doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of time in LR with each RAW image. I apply a base set development settings in LR to all applicable images and then only have to make a few minor changes (if at all) to the other images. I'm also not trying to say that "this way" or "that way" is "right" or "wrong." If you find that you're happy with Nikon (using the settings you pick in Picture Control on the camera) applying the de facto "Development" actions on the RAW image data before it writes the JPG to the card, then that's great. For me, I find that I can produce, on average, a "better" end product if I call the shots in post-processing... and I don't feel I suffer a time penalty when I do it.
I'm with HolmstromRules on this one. I've been shooting sports since 2004, with a combination of RAW and JPG over the years, and I much prefer RAW. For a lot of the same reasons listed above. It's so much nicer having that extra data to play with.
Since I made that video, I've had somewhat of a change of heart regarding RAW versus JPG for low light, high ISO sports action. But, that change came due to better technology related to dealing with noise, more than anything else. See this video for an explanation: czcams.com/video/fIfZFuHQiEs/video.html
Hi Jack I just have a question. I can take about 1000 shots per event on average. I have never used RAW. It takes a long time to get through 1000 shots in JPEG in culling then editing. Does it take longer to edit RAW per image? If so, how much longer? I dont think I can handle longer editing sessions so I just stay with JPEG. I think you should also do a video on photo storage. I have filled my lap top hard drive many times making my editing very sluggish until I can offload a ton of photos to an external hard drive and talking about a good filing or organized naming system might be helpful? Thanks for your helpful videos.
Thanks for the kind words! What are you using to cull your photos? I recommend Photo Mechanic! It’s very quick compared to doing it in standard editing software. And yes, good idea on the data storage video!
@@JackBeasleyMedia Long ago I started with Corel Paint Shop Pro and stuck with them with latest versions. There is an option to scroll thru full size pictures and when I see a possible keeper I give it 5 stars. After marking the ones I want, I move to edit mode and only work on the starred ones. It has been working for me for years even if there is a better way, I never changed . When it comes to editing, I dont think there are any major shortcuts but I could be wrong. Take care.
I shoot Raw+Jpeg one type to each card. At the game I sort and post from the jpgs, choosing 40-50 of the best shots that I am uploading from the stadium. When I get home if there are any that stand out as amazing, maybe 1-2 from that 50, I pull the RAW off the other other card just for those images, and spend a little time working on it. Maybe that image is going to a poster or into my portfolio. Oh and when I'm teaching I always encourage people to shoot both, edit the RAW and then compare it to the jpeg. If your edited RAW is not as good as the straight form the camera jpeg, maybe it's skills of the student than need improvement. I think it a good sanity check.
@@DeputyNordburg Comparing your edited RAWs to the JPEG is a good idea and one I didn't think to include. By the way, that kind of comparison is exactly why I now advocate JPEGs in some situations - they ended up better looking than my edited RAWs.
The relative size of RAW images is probably the largest drawback to using them, as Jack mentions, in terms of storage and time to load/render. I solved the load/render issue by using a PC that was up to the task of handling RAW images with ease. In my case, I built a PC based on the published recommendations of Puget Systems. Puget sells "purpose built" PCs for the task at hand and they test a large combination of PC components and run benchmark testing. The good thing is that in addition to selling completed systems, they publish their recommendations. They have a recommended solution for Lightroom. I took those specs and build my own and it didn't cost me a ton. I now can ingest RAW images with ease and can navigate between and zoom-into them in Lightroom seamlessly. This isn't to say that you need such a PC, but it does make life easier. By comparison, when I'm editing remotely I use a 5-year-old ASUS laptop that uses an Intel i7, with 12 GB of RAM, and has a 1TB SSD. When that setup, it can take a second or two to move between images or zoom to 100% on them. It's not bad, but it's noticeable. It was a lot worse before I replaced the slow HDD that came with the laptop with a SSD.
Oh, I know his deal. Since I made that video, I've moved more to the RAW side than JPEG, mostly because the newer noise reduction software options for RAW photos are so darned good these days.
Can you please tell me the Picture Control Settings and any adjustments you make when shooting sports on your D5 when shooting SOC in jpg format? Thanks, Bob.
Jack Beasly, thanks for the great video. Can we not apply the same in-camera JPEG NR processing outside the camera to the RAW file on the PC? Is the exact same in-camera jpeg NR not available outside the camera? It takes the camera like a microsecond to apply corections to the image from the sensor to produce a great looking jpeg. I see you fiddling with buttons for a few minutes on your PC to try to make the RAW image look like the jpeg from the camera. Is there not a preset in Nikon's software on the PC that does exactly what the camera does? Apply the preset on the RAW file on your PC with one button and out comes a great looking jpeg, and takes a microsecond to do like how the camera does it?
You can replicate the actions your camera is taking in the RAW editor your camera manufacturer makes. In my case, it is Nikon's NX Studio. I would imagine that Sony's and Canon's RAW editors would produce similar results.
@@JackBeasleyMedia I will need help figuring out what button to press in NX Studio as I could not figure this out on my own. Maybe a future video from you? Thanks.
Auto iso should not be limited to 16000iso! It's better to get the exposer than to try to recover in post. Especially if you accidentally keep your shutterspeed too high, the high iso will save you and you'll get an image. ESPECIALLY EITH THE D5 that camera can get to 36,000 iso and look very clean. Also for autofocus I use 3d tracking and if I hold down front bottoms (top or bottom)with my middle finger it switches to single. Super awesome hot swapping from single point to 3D all the time
I disagree on the “no limits” for ISO. There is definitely a point in each camera model where colors shift at extremely high ISOs and it’s very hard to correct. What that point is varies based on the user’s appetite for noise, grain, and color shift.
@@JackBeasleyMedia Have you determined what is better - converting NEF to TIFF or JPEG to TIFF when processing in Topaz Denoise? Assuming NEF to TIFF would maintain better quality... Unless it would carry over more noise.
My current method with low light / high ISO is shoot JPEG, cull, run them through Topaz Denoise, export from there as either TIF or DNG, and do final edits in Lightroom. For daylight, I shoot RAW, cull, do basic WB and exposure correction in Nikon NXD, export as TIF, run them through Topaz Denoise as TIF or DNG, and do final edits in Lightroom. (I know those are a lot of steps, but I do most of the computer export batching while I do something else productive)
Thanks for watching this video! If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you!
Finally, a video that actually explains how you should actually process RAW files .
The raw to tiff to 3rd party workflow is truly the best way when you have time to deliver.
great video!
Thank you!
One more thing Jack, I really appreciate your final comments re using JPG shots after sorting events. I’m right there…. the girls(soccer) are so used to immediate results, that the JPG shots get uploaded to the file sharing right away. I do keep some NEFs, but time is everything, as you do correctly pointed out.
Hi Jack! Great approach! I've seen hundreds of videos, as I have been working my way (hopefully) up into Sports Photography. Pretty average and humble photographer and this is to say that I've earn (at least) the capability of filtering bad content! I'm in no position to critique, but this is definitely a great channel, from someone that knows the business truly. Thank You and, of course, the least that I could do was to subscribe and looking forward for future videos...still a lot to catch up from your library!!! Cheers
Thank you, Carlos!
@@JackBeasleyMedia Thank You Jack for the feedback!
I photograph my small town's club and college sports each weekend. One reason I always shoot in jpeg, is because of the extra time taken to edit a raw file. My images are only posted on my face book sports page and shared to the club/school's fb pages. People may only look at an image a few times and by Tuesday evening the players/parents etc are already tuned in to the next weekend's game. For my circumstance, editing 50 images from a college rugby game, or 170 images from a pony club day would be a nightmare to edit in raw. I do this as a retirement hobby, it is not a source of income.
I’m a sports photographer who hates JPEG. But I shoot JPEG. I am aware that it is a 20+ year old file format that is well past its expiration date. But it has become the standard. It is good to see that as mirrorless cameras progress, more are making HEIF and HEIC File formats available. These are compressed and processed but retain dramatically more information, smaller file size and have a broader color range than JPEG’s. This is a great video. Thank you for producing it. Hopefully in a few years this won’t be an issue anymore.
Thanks Mike!
Excellent job at comparing these and why, and better than I have yet heard explained in such detail as you have done.
Thanks!
Jack - Another excellent presentation with lots of information AND documentation! You do an superb job - please keep on keeping on.
Thank you, Rob!
Great video Jack. Would really be interesting to see a deeper comparison between NX Studio and LR, especially with a workflow of exporting from NX to Topaz Denoise and such.
Thanks! Yep, free editing software is on my to-do list. And, since I’m a Nikon guy, NX Studio would be heavily featured.
Thanks Jack, it does seem I spend a lot of time for little to no gain editing low light raw files.
Yep, I started off doing the same thing until I started comparing the results.
I think it's important to remember many of the "RAW is superior 100%" of the time arguments come from people who came to that conclusion with gear from 15 years ago. In camera JPGs have improved a great deal since then. You also hear people like Peter Read Miller state they only shoot RAW because that's what the team of professional editors he sends his pics to want. Great, but I don't have that team, and again, that team formed up 10+ years ago.
I think it's important to know how to edit RAW properly, because it certainly has its uses. However, to advocate that JPEG has no value or that RAW is the end-all and be-all is short-sighted, or as you said, based on a select group of employers or customers.
@@JackBeasleyMedia I agree that it's silly to try and claim that JPGs are useless. When I shoot auto races, I often have to transmit images from trackside via Wi-Fi and FTP. Clients cannot handle RAW images and the size of them is also a barrier.
I’m still shooting with gear that is 15 years old. Or older. Still rocking a Nikon D2h and 80-200 Af-d.
I teach a Sports Photography class in Georgetown Texas-Great Video-Will show this to my class-Thank you
Wow! Thanks for the compliment!
Excellent flog Jack, I was out yesterday with my D6 photographing some cricket, used Jpeg fine, and was so pleased with the files, I'm going to get the Nikon software as it looks pretty good.
Thanks and good luck!
I love your content it’s been so helpful
Glad I could help!
Great video! But when people say wait till the end of the video I skipped it to the end.
I don't understand the comparison of applying the same transformations to the NEF and the JPG in parallel. I assume that the reason that the JPG looks "better" out of the gate is that you're using High ISO NR in-camera that has already been applied to the JPG. The RAW image has no NR applied from the start, so it makes perfect sense that the JPG will look "better" when you look at it initially (likely also due to in-camera sharpening being applied). If you want a better comparison, then apply some NR in Lightroom to the RAW image as well as some sharpening in order to apply the same treatment that the JPG got in-camera before you ingested it into Lightroom.
As for applying "auto" to the image, "auto" setting normally follow the 80/20 rule. "Auto" algorithms normally work when applied to an "average" image in terms of brightness, contrast and color. When you apply it to an image that is at one extreme or another, the results often go off of the rails. For example, if you apply "auto" to a black cat sitting on a coal pile at night or a snowman in a blizzard, you're going to get funky results because the software is going to "center" the results in terms of brightness, etc.. The same goes for night football where most of the pixels will be overly dark and "auto" will try and make the whole image look like it wasn't taken at night.
My personal experience is that high ISO images are where RAW shines when compared to JPGs. Particularly when it comes to recovering shadow details. I shoot tons of ice hockey and am starting to get back into football. With players wearing helmets and players with darker skin tones, you often have to fight some shadows on their faces. The same is true when a player's face is in the shadow of another player. I've found that with RAW images it's generally easier to make the player's faces look brighter and sharper without turning the facial skins details to mush.
I would agree that RAWs retain more details in those high ISO situations. I guess it comes down to what you want to emphasize - more detail but more grain, or less grain but less detail. I tend to go to the less grain side of the fence.
@@JackBeasleyMedia Jack, I hope I'm not coming off as a contrarian, but there's no reason that you have to make that trade-off with RAW images. The out-of-camera JPG starts out as a "RAW image" too, but becomes a JPG after the Nikon firmware applies the "post-processing" (NR, sharpening, saturation, compression, etc.). The only real difference is if you want Nikon (guided by the settings you use in Picture Control) to apply the post-processing for you when it renders the JPG, or if you can do control it yourself in Lightroom. I prefer to do it in post myself because Lightroom offers you many more controls and because Nikon applies changes with a broad brush to the entire image (for example, I prefer to use unsharp masking in LR to limit sharpening-related detail loss). This also doesn't mean that you have to spend a lot of time in LR with each RAW image. I apply a base set development settings in LR to all applicable images and then only have to make a few minor changes (if at all) to the other images.
I'm also not trying to say that "this way" or "that way" is "right" or "wrong." If you find that you're happy with Nikon (using the settings you pick in Picture Control on the camera) applying the de facto "Development" actions on the RAW image data before it writes the JPG to the card, then that's great. For me, I find that I can produce, on average, a "better" end product if I call the shots in post-processing... and I don't feel I suffer a time penalty when I do it.
I'm with HolmstromRules on this one. I've been shooting sports since 2004, with a combination of RAW and JPG over the years, and I much prefer RAW. For a lot of the same reasons listed above. It's so much nicer having that extra data to play with.
Since I made that video, I've had somewhat of a change of heart regarding RAW versus JPG for low light, high ISO sports action. But, that change came due to better technology related to dealing with noise, more than anything else. See this video for an explanation: czcams.com/video/fIfZFuHQiEs/video.html
Awesome video. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much. New subscriber here!
Welcome aboard!
Hi Jack I just have a question. I can take about 1000 shots per event on average. I have never used RAW. It takes a long time to get through 1000 shots in JPEG in culling then editing. Does it take longer to edit RAW per image? If so, how much longer? I dont think I can handle longer editing sessions so I just stay with JPEG. I think you should also do a video on photo storage. I have filled my lap top hard drive many times making my editing very sluggish until I can offload a ton of photos to an external hard drive and talking about a good filing or organized naming system might be helpful? Thanks for your helpful videos.
Thanks for the kind words! What are you using to cull your photos? I recommend Photo Mechanic! It’s very quick compared to doing it in standard editing software. And yes, good idea on the data storage video!
@@JackBeasleyMedia Long ago I started with Corel Paint Shop Pro and stuck with them with latest versions. There is an option to scroll thru full size pictures and when I see a possible keeper I give it 5 stars. After marking the ones I want, I move to edit mode and only work on the starred ones. It has been working for me for years even if there is a better way, I never changed . When it comes to editing, I dont think there are any major shortcuts but I could be wrong. Take care.
I shoot Raw+Jpeg one type to each card. At the game I sort and post from the jpgs, choosing 40-50 of the best shots that I am uploading from the stadium. When I get home if there are any that stand out as amazing, maybe 1-2 from that 50, I pull the RAW off the other other card just for those images, and spend a little time working on it. Maybe that image is going to a poster or into my portfolio.
Oh and when I'm teaching I always encourage people to shoot both, edit the RAW and then compare it to the jpeg. If your edited RAW is not as good as the straight form the camera jpeg, maybe it's skills of the student than need improvement. I think it a good sanity check.
@@DeputyNordburg Comparing your edited RAWs to the JPEG is a good idea and one I didn't think to include. By the way, that kind of comparison is exactly why I now advocate JPEGs in some situations - they ended up better looking than my edited RAWs.
The relative size of RAW images is probably the largest drawback to using them, as Jack mentions, in terms of storage and time to load/render. I solved the load/render issue by using a PC that was up to the task of handling RAW images with ease. In my case, I built a PC based on the published recommendations of Puget Systems. Puget sells "purpose built" PCs for the task at hand and they test a large combination of PC components and run benchmark testing. The good thing is that in addition to selling completed systems, they publish their recommendations. They have a recommended solution for Lightroom. I took those specs and build my own and it didn't cost me a ton. I now can ingest RAW images with ease and can navigate between and zoom-into them in Lightroom seamlessly.
This isn't to say that you need such a PC, but it does make life easier. By comparison, when I'm editing remotely I use a 5-year-old ASUS laptop that uses an Intel i7, with 12 GB of RAM, and has a 1TB SSD. When that setup, it can take a second or two to move between images or zoom to 100% on them. It's not bad, but it's noticeable. It was a lot worse before I replaced the slow HDD that came with the laptop with a SSD.
Thank you for these videos!!
Glad you like them!
Why don't you mention that you can modify your JPEG profile in the camera in case the generic preset from the factory does not please you?
Great video!
Fro knows photo swears by raw. I never shoot raw for sports during the day but at night I do sometimes
Oh, I know his deal.
Since I made that video, I've moved more to the RAW side than JPEG, mostly because the newer noise reduction software options for RAW photos are so darned good these days.
Wow noise in jpg as well..............Glad I shoot with Sony A9 and A1 with GM glass
Can you please tell me the Picture Control Settings and any adjustments you make when shooting sports on your D5 when shooting SOC in jpg format? Thanks, Bob.
I shoot Canon cameras. If I shoot JPEG with high ISO noise reduction on will that slow down my frame rate?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, "no". I've never heard of that.
Jack Beasly, thanks for the great video. Can we not apply the same in-camera JPEG NR processing outside the camera to the RAW file on the PC? Is the exact same in-camera jpeg NR not available outside the camera? It takes the camera like a microsecond to apply corections to the image from the sensor to produce a great looking jpeg. I see you fiddling with buttons for a few minutes on your PC to try to make the RAW image look like the jpeg from the camera. Is there not a preset in Nikon's software on the PC that does exactly what the camera does? Apply the preset on the RAW file on your PC with one button and out comes a great looking jpeg, and takes a microsecond to do like how the camera does it?
You can replicate the actions your camera is taking in the RAW editor your camera manufacturer makes. In my case, it is Nikon's NX Studio. I would imagine that Sony's and Canon's RAW editors would produce similar results.
@@JackBeasleyMedia I will need help figuring out what button to press in NX Studio as I could not figure this out on my own. Maybe a future video from you? Thanks.
Is it just me or did that RAw conversion seem about a stop brighter than the Jpeg which would explain a lot of the noise?
The same corrections were done on both - the whole syncing thing.
@@JackBeasleyMedia was it just me, or was one much brighter than the other?
Auto iso should not be limited to 16000iso! It's better to get the exposer than to try to recover in post. Especially if you accidentally keep your shutterspeed too high, the high iso will save you and you'll get an image. ESPECIALLY EITH THE D5 that camera can get to 36,000 iso and look very clean. Also for autofocus I use 3d tracking and if I hold down front bottoms (top or bottom)with my middle finger it switches to single. Super awesome hot swapping from single point to 3D all the time
I disagree on the “no limits” for ISO. There is definitely a point in each camera model where colors shift at extremely high ISOs and it’s very hard to correct. What that point is varies based on the user’s appetite for noise, grain, and color shift.
Jack, I also have the D850. What High ISO NR setting did you use on the JPEG (football shot)? off, low, normal or high?
normal
@@JackBeasleyMedia Have you determined what is better - converting NEF to TIFF or JPEG to TIFF when processing in Topaz Denoise? Assuming NEF to TIFF would maintain better quality... Unless it would carry over more noise.
My current method with low light / high ISO is shoot JPEG, cull, run them through Topaz Denoise, export from there as either TIF or DNG, and do final edits in Lightroom. For daylight, I shoot RAW, cull, do basic WB and exposure correction in Nikon NXD, export as TIF, run them through Topaz Denoise as TIF or DNG, and do final edits in Lightroom. (I know those are a lot of steps, but I do most of the computer export batching while I do something else productive)
good vid
Wow, what a nice vid. I had no idea that such flexibility was available.
I’m staying with JPEG. I don’t want to spend a lot of time fixing raw files. 😂😂😂
@@tomgodzik8951 Set up some presets. Then, just adjust crop and exposure. Most of my edits take less than 10 seconds each.