Fidelity vs. Convenience
by eNoBlog on Dec.23, 2009, under Post-processing
Kevin Maney’s recent book, Trade-Off : Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, points out how products that succeed usually fall at one end or the other of the Fidelity vs. Convenience spectrum. Maney gives the example of music, where a live performance is expensive and inconvenient to access, but gives the greatest fidelity as far as sound quality and musical experience are concerned. MP3s, on the other hand, give low fidelity but are extremely portable and user friendly, i.e., convenient. The author goes on to point out that either of these extremes is fairly successful: people still pay through the nose to go to concerts, while others download MP3s by the ton. CDs and DVD-As fall somewhere in between, and while they ticked for a while (actually DVD-As never really took off, and CDs used to be the convenience kings), now they’re on their way out.
Apply this to photography and the RAW vs. JPG question, and what do you have? Fidelity vs. Convenience, respectively. Each format will continue to succeed on its own accord. RAW brings along the maximum amount of information, and so long as you edit it in the right tool, the ability to make incremental and reversible changes. On the negative side, they’re a pain to manage. They’re not portable (in the sense of cross-application support) without moderate effort, editing them is usually slow, and they occupy a great deal of disk space. Then there’s the big gotcha: no Web browser displays them directly.
JPGs on the other hand are extremely portable, and for most applications, offer sufficient fidelity. Start editing and/or saving them repeatedly, however, and fidelity drops off. At the end of the day 2 to the 8th power (for 8-bit JPGs) will not hold as much color/shade data as 2 to the 12th or 2 to the 14th power in RAW files. Lossy JPG compression further diminishes quality. But JPGs win on convenience by a long shot. They are recognized by any software application that wasn’t written more than 20 years ago (okay, I exaggerate) and are terrific for Web display and networked transmission.
Middle of the road formats such as TIF (full 16-bit) or PNG (8-bit, but not lossy) are useful under some applications, but end up being wishy-washy about things like storage size, EXIF inclusion, and/or image quality, and therefore enjoy moderate success and acceptance.
Which to pick? It’s up to you whether convenience or fidelity holds the greatest value. Personally, after shooting out-of-camera (OOC) JPGs for 2 months, and giving RAW a try one day, I could never go back. The flexibility I gained over pre-canned or even customizable in-camera settings and algorithms was too great for me to pass up. Why would I want, for instance, to control sharpness in my images in a rough 0-9 scale, when I can address each image’s need, even going as far as to apply sharpening to special areas of an image with Unsharp Mask techniques? Why would I want to do likewise with saturation, hue, and contrast settings, or even pre-programmed custom curves that would apply to all my images, rather than adjust these parameters in fine-tunable, granular increments on a per image basis to support that image’s needs and my vision for it?
Is all of that post-processing tweaking convenient? By no means. It amounts to paying a handsome price for concert tickets and fighting crowds and rush hour traffic to get there. But oh, the music you can make.
December 24th, 2009 on 1:23 am
Great post and your comments mirror my own journey into raw as well. have a great Christmas.
Sj.
December 26th, 2009 on 2:38 pm
Yes, a fine post. Personally, I spend too much time at a keyboard already; I’d rather be outside and hoping to catch that magic shot where it all goes right, and live with JPEG limitations. A modern P&S does a pretty amazing job, especially if you tweak the settings. But each to his own.
December 26th, 2009 on 6:59 pm
It’s a personal choice. As you know I have the Leica DL4, and it’s really the first pocket cam where I would even consider shooting straight jpegs. Otherwise it’s been raw all the way since about 2004 I think.
Personally, why anyone would own a DSLR and not shoot Raw befuddles me. Why would you pay premium for a body and lens, and the not want to exploit that equipment to it’s fullest potential? It’s like buying a Harley and riding it on the side streets.
To me there is no convenience tradeoff. I can view things easily enough in Adobe Bridge, make any minor adjustments, then either process a few or batch process and resize the whole lot for emailing if I want. There is the comfort of knowing that for fine art stuff or commercial images, I have that exceptional amount of leeway that raw gives me. Since I’m pretty ruthless in my editing, image storage size isn’t an issue either.
December 26th, 2009 on 7:18 pm
My own personal journey into Raw processing began around 2004 when, at the suggestion of a long time personal mentor, I shot Raw plus fine jpeg for a small architectural project. The results were telling. The sharp architectural elements against a polarized blue sky produced camera jpegs with the telltale artifacting where stone met sky, aka, the high contrast areas, but in the Raw files no artifacting existed. Why leave such processing decisions to a piece of hardware?
December 27th, 2009 on 7:30 pm
I thought this comment funny. “Why would you pay premium for a body and lens, and the not want to exploit that equipment to it’s fullest potential? It’s like buying a Harley and riding it on the side streets.”
Yet they have no problems using PHotoshop with its rudimentary bicubic algorithm that loses 50% of the fine detail every time they do a resizing, perspective correction, or rotation of any type. Reducing the image quality from their DSLR to that of a bubble-packed digicam at the toy store.