Sometimes I am surprised to myself that as an opponent of jpeg I am increasingly thinking about shooting in jpeg. Reportage photography in my work is efficiency. Due to certain working conditions, you gradually come to the point of less processing and trying to shoot so that the image is immediately ready.
But this is right, this is "to know Zen in photography".
If you visualize a schedule of my preferences in photo processing, it will be in the form of a quadratic parabola. At first I shot in jpeg, then I learned about raw, then I began to study layers and retouching, then I went back to just processing raw, and now I'm thinking of shooting in jpeg.
Photo from SPIEF-2021.
But I'm just thinking, as I use different formats in different genres of photography.
Press center SPIEF-2021.
For example, I use jpeg so far exclusively for work for the sake of efficiency.
SPIEF-2021 interactive platform.
But I noticed that the jpeg gives an interesting color. And in raw, you have to achieve this result yourself.
I often catch myself thinking that I do not want to process this or that picture because of the color that suits me so well.
I only do this to highlight the shadows or dim lights. Yes, raw does this much better.
Much more depends on the camera. On old DSLRs jpeg is so bad at all, worse than in a smartphone (I have given examples many times). And raw will be at least some kind of salvation.
And now everything is just great in modern cameras!
I always say the same thing to everyone: if you have the ability to shoot and process in raw, then it is better to use this function.
And if someone still thinks that jpeg is a photo without processing, then this is a deep mistake.
The shutter opened, the matrix passed light through the photosensitive elements (pixels) and gave the information to the processor, which the resulting binary code was rewritten into a picture, having previously processed it in accordance with the camera settings.
Yes, by default your camera still has certain picture settings that you can change. There is contrast, sharpness, hue, saturation. You can set multiple profiles and even customize the black and white mode!
And raw is literally raw information (for those who did not know yet, the word raw is not an abbreviation, but the word "raw"), which the matrix writes directly to the USB flash drive without compression.
So, most likely, in-camera jpeg is a much more processed picture than you yourself will process raw and convert it to jpeg.
Although the second option at the output turns out much better than the first. But this is also logical: in the first version, the camera gave you an average version, and in the second, you did only those key manipulations that are necessary to create the best image.