I’m getting into digital photography, and I’ve got a 3.2 megapixel camera. It’s my understanding that working with pictures in RAW format is best in order to prevent degradation of the image, but my camera will only capture pictures in JPEG. Granted, the maximum resolution available in the camera is something called JPEG: Large-Superfine, which gives you a picture of 2048x1536 pixels.
Would there be any point in converting pictures of this size to RAW format? Would there be compromises in picture quality as a result of this conversion?
RAW fomat is an uncompressed, lose-less quality format; so if you have a jpg and turn it into a RAW it won´t look a bit different, but if you start editing it, each time you save a jpg image it degrades a little, like a photocopy of a photocopy, etc… Instead of RAW you can turn the images into TIFF or TGA formats, or even BMP; anyone of those will not generate compression artifacts anytime you save the image after editing.
Converting from JPEG to raw would be nearly pointless. Once they’re saved as JPEG, the damage is done. If you plan on manipulating them further, causing them to be re-saved as JPEG, converting them to RAW as an intermediate format can reduce further degradation, but the bulk of the damage happens when your camera creates the original JPEG file.
However, for many, many photos, you won’t be able to tell the difference between raw and the best JPEG setting without really looking close. JPEG looks good for regular photos, which is why it’s become the typical storage format for cameras. It’ll fall apart in certain situations, such as pictures with very limited color range (e.g. in a very dark picture, you might get repeating patterns in the details, or blocky blotches of color variation instead of smooth gradations), and that’s where you’d benefit from using a camera’s “raw” format.
And on preview, I see Ale has beat me to the punch, but I’ll submit anyway in case my perspective is helpful.
What I’m hoping to do is minimze further image degradation during the time that I’m editing and saving the pictures. So judging from your answers, it sounds like what I could do is take the JPEG image from the camera, convert it to RAW (or TIFF, as Ale suggested), and work with that converted image for editing. That way, I’d avoid further compression artifacts during the editing process. Then, when I’m done editing the picture, I would try saving the final picture as either a TIFF, JPEG (with the lowest compression), or separate final images of both. Naturally, I would keep the original just in case.
It’s something that I’m trying to think of doing in the meantime until the day comes that I get a camera that will allow me to capture RAW images. Aside from the inevitable introduction of additional compression artifacts during the reconversion to JPEG (even at the lowest compression setting, there are bound to be a few), are there any other drawbacks?
RAW isn’t actually a format per se, at least not the same as JPEG or TIFF is a format. RAW images are simply (as has been stated already) unaltered data from the camera sensor. It is the image with no white balance applied, no unsharp masking applied, no color saturation, etc.
Better you should convert your hi-rez JPEGs to TIFF. If you have Photoshop Elements 2.0 you can do this individually if you’ve only got one or two, or use batch processing if you’ve got a lot.
Just copy/convert them to the standard image format of your graphics program. Call it the new copy master. Now make a copy of that master to manipulate, with the final copy of the image saved as a .jpg file.
You will always have the camera master image (straight from the camera) and the master copy image created from it. You only use the camera master image to produce a copy image. You only use the copy image to produce working copies, from which you create final .jpg images.
There will not be any noticeable image degradation for your web pages and ordinary documents.
Duckster has it right. It isn’t about format, its about working correctly. Once you transfer the image to your computer, there is never a valid reason to ever Save the image. Edit it to your heart’s content in any format you like and then do a Save As or Save Copy As for the finished piece and put the original away without Saving it. “Do you want to Save your changes?” Simply answer NO.