There’s not much meaning to a “non-color graded” or “non-sharpened” picture. Many choices must inevitably be made along the pipeline from estimated-electron-co

There’s not much meaning to a “non-color graded” or “non-sharpened” picture. Many choices must inevitably be made along the pipeline from estimated-electron-count-per-sensor-pixel -> image on a display. Default choices are not inherently more correct (or truer to the scene or whatever) than deliberate choices. The fairest comparison is probably to find someone highly skilled at image editing and get them to try to make the best output images they can from both inputs. You’ll get to see places where the standard processing and compression actually lost data. Often the processed-in-camera version still has enough data that a more-or-less comparable output image can be produced, but if you start peeping on pixels you might notice extra noise, banding, blur, ringing, ... The problem with the comparison videos in this thread is that the person/software deciding what to do with the “raw” data has made a bunch of choices to allocate more contrast to shadow and highlight areas, etc., while the in-camera software made a different choice... and nobody tried to reconcile the two versions afterward. Comparing the amount of usable data available