> In this meaning, and based on what I see on Flickr, Ipernity and
> others I'm conviced that one day I'll probably shoot 90% jpeg, which
> nevertheless can be sufficently (for my taste) tweaked in Darktable
> and Bros. Most people won't ever never see the difference when printed
> or on screen size.
I expect to always shoot in RAW for two reasons, no matter how good and
tweakable the JPEG processing in cameras get.
First, shooting in RAW means that I don't have to try to judge the
picture's colour and tonality from the little LCD on the back of the
camera while I'm out in the field. Plenty of painful experience has
shown me that I am fairly bad at this, in both directions even with
just camera JPEGs (pictures that look fine or even great rendered on
the LCD look bad on the computer, and 'wrong' pictures can look fine on
the computer). Since RAW can change both tonality and colours after the
fact without much problems, I can mostly get away with just checking the
histogram.
(Since I not infrequently shift white balance for artistic effect,
getting the colours right isn't just as simple as 'take a white balance
shot off a grey card beforehand'. Accurate WB gives me 'correct' JPEG
colours, but not necessarily the colours that I want.)
Second, I'm increasingly using Darktable to make selective alterations
to only some areas of the picture to do things like bring up shadows or
tame highlights. Even if cameras become technically capable of doing
this, I don't want to try to set it up and do it through the little back
of camera LCD and the limited control interface a camera necessarily is
restricted to.
In theory I believe you can do all these sorts of alterations on
JPEGs after the fact, not just RAWs. However, my understanding is
that RAWs give you far more latitude to do things without creating
visible artifacts like posterization. And in practice, photo
processing programs today and probably in the future are far more
willing to do these sort of changes with RAWs than with JPEGs.
Even if I could reliably 'get it right' in the camera and know that I'd
done so, I sometimes change my mind about how best to realize a picture
once I'm staring at it on my computer. The on the spot idea I had in my
head when I took the picture is not always right or the best option.
Sometimes there's a better option (and sometimes the photo turns out to
be a writeoff, and no amount of tweaking its development will help).
- cks
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