Well, I am a photojournalist. At least more significant part of my
income comes from that. I don't have the time nor computer to shoot
everything in RAW. Almost all of my photographs are in JPEG, excluding
few with very, very difficult light. JPEG is totally sufficient for
the stuff I do. If I had about 16GB of cards, I would surelly shoot
RAW+JPEG, send the JPEGs and keep the RAWs for later, but I don't
(have that much space). Sometimes it's easier with JPEGs because I can
set it up correctly beforehand (WB, contrast) and not worry about
_deciding_ from so many options upon RAW conversion (which just eats
time I don't have). Most RAW converters other than the original
camera makers' (which usually suck) don't recognise the information
about camera set-up upon conversion. If you know what I mean,
sometimes it is much more time consuming just deciding how to edit
that particular RAW file. And the news and wires and mags want to tone
the photographs anyway so it will look well with others or ads on the same
page. Sure, RAW has advantages. Sometimes. But we have had this discussion
already, countless times...
I was asking about HSB/HSL colour modes, because I don't understand
much about them. Yet they seem to offer, in _some_ circumstances, a
definite advantage to toning in RGB mode. I was hoping this could be
of interest, even to RAW shooters (you can't dodge/burn in your RAW
editor, do you... and even the editor works only in RGB space, with
all the associated problems of adjusting curves and saturation which
affect the hues differently, if I understand it right? Even in the RAW
converter, editing curves would change the hue/saturation of the
tones in RGB mode.
OK, so if I find something more about the issue, I will post it
here...
I don't want to get into the RAW vs. JPEG holy war, but I'm saying
that if you're going to do drastic exposure changes to JPEG photo as you
suggest, you will have a tough time. There just isn't enough information
there to pull out underexposed shots, and when you do you get weird
artifacts. It has nothing to do with what colorspace you do the editing
in... that just changes the effects of the oddities.
You'll basically be trying to manually create color information
that is not there in the photo, so whatever works best. I'm not creative,
so I cannot help there.
-Cory
--
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* Cory Papenfuss *
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University *
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