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What I'm surprised by is that a decade later we don't have better off-camera raw to jpeg conversion tools (or at least I haven't used any great ones). It shoul

by kag0 5y ago

What I'm surprised by is that a decade later we don't have better off-camera raw to jpeg conversion tools (or at least I haven't used any great ones). It should be possible to feed a bunch of raw files to a program and get back a) the exact same jpeg that the camera would have produced and/or b) an even better jpeg than the camera would have produced, given the significantly greater hardware resources available. Expanding even more, given a relatively stable exposure bracketed burst shot, we should be able to get a very good hdr jpeg from two or three raw photos. note that I'm talking about doing all of this automatically. of course we can get a great jpeg from a raw with some quick work in lightroom, but that shouldn't be necessary for many images.

SilverRed 5y ago
This assumes that turning a RAW in to a JPEG is a computationally significant task. Cameras already have fairly powerful CPUs to be able to record 4k video. If more power was needed it would make more sense to put a high power ARM chip in the camera than to build software to do it externally.
vmception 5y ago
in lightroom, note that you can apply preferences you made to one image to all images in the batch if you want, same for exporting. if you dont like the default color profile of the raw processor in the chosen app, you have to import a camera profile or manually adjust and apply in batch. I don't think there is any way around this as the default raw processor is the computational assumption of most correct. Maybe some machine learning and analytics can help a program guess for the user.
ironman1478 5y ago
I don't know if it's generalizable. Processing raw sensor data requires a knowledge about the dynamic range and knowledge about non linear characteristics of the sensor. Bitdepth isn't the only differentiating factor between raw sensor data. 0x100 doesn't mean the same for 2 different sensors. Also, there is an assumption in the article that the data is linear, but that's not true of all sensors. Some compand their data and there is hardware in the camera to relinearize the sensor output.
BeetleB 5y ago
> It should be possible to feed a bunch of raw files to a program and get back a) the exact same jpeg that the camera would have produced Why? The camera applied a very opinionated algorithm to get that jpeg. Your RAW editor is a very large set (virtually infinite) of opinions on how to produce a JPG. Why hyper-focus on getting the exact same jpeg as the one the camera produced? And if you really want that, why not just shoot JPEG? > b) an even better jpeg than the camera would have produced, For sure, many RAW photographers will claim they do have default settings that produces better JPEGs than the camera does. However, better is very subjective.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
It'll depend a little on the manufacturer, and your camera's settings. For some manufacturers, their own RAW conversion software will indeed perform such a feat. Note that I would not personally necessarily define that as a "better/great raw conversion tool" - there's many other criteria, and for many of us, once we shoot raw, we don't look at in-camera images/JPEG the same way any more. It is weird and a bit hoighty-toighty to describe, but when I look at scene either in real world or in camera nowadays, my brain automatically sees what can come out of it, i.e. the end result I want, rather than just straight pixels on camera. Or to put it other way, I don't bother to make JPEG come out in any particular way as long as I know I've captured the right data exposure wise, so there'd be zero value to me in a converter that mimicked camera JPEG. Note that many cameras actually encode a full JPEG they shot INSIDE the RAW. You may notice if you look at file in e.g. ACDsee, it'll first show exactly as you shot it because it uses this JPEG for preview; and then, what happened, a second later it changes, as it loads the RAW. There are tools to extract this JPEG if you so desire. Otherwise, if manufacturer doesn't have good raw converter, and you use e.g. Lightroom, you can setup a lot of settings to come up pretty close to what camera spits out. But as others have pointed out there may always be fine differences. The easiest solution of course is to use RAW+JPG shooting mode, bypassing the problem entirely :)

by kag0 5y ago

SilverRed 5y ago

This assumes that turning a RAW in to a JPEG is a computationally significant task. Cameras already have fairly powerful CPUs to be able to record 4k video. If more power was needed it would make more sense to put a high power ARM chip in the camera than to build software to do it externally.

vmception 5y ago

in lightroom, note that you can apply preferences you made to one image to all images in the batch if you want, same for exporting. if you dont like the default color profile of the raw processor in the chosen app, you have to import a camera profile or manually adjust and apply in batch. I don't think there is any way around this as the default raw processor is the computational assumption of most correct. Maybe some machine learning and analytics can help a program guess for the user.

ironman1478 5y ago

I don't know if it's generalizable. Processing raw sensor data requires a knowledge about the dynamic range and knowledge about non linear characteristics of the sensor. Bitdepth isn't the only differentiating factor between raw sensor data. 0x100 doesn't mean the same for 2 different sensors. Also, there is an assumption in the article that the data is linear, but that's not true of all sensors. Some compand their data and there is hardware in the camera to relinearize the sensor output.

BeetleB 5y ago

> It should be possible to feed a bunch of raw files to a program and get back a) the exact same jpeg that the camera would have produced Why? The camera applied a very opinionated algorithm to get that jpeg. Your RAW editor is a very large set (virtually infinite) of opinions on how to produce a JPG. Why hyper-focus on getting the exact same jpeg as the one the camera produced? And if you really want that, why not just shoot JPEG? > b) an even better jpeg than the camera would have produced, For sure, many RAW photographers will claim they do have default settings that produces better JPEGs than the camera does. However, better is very subjective.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

It'll depend a little on the manufacturer, and your camera's settings. For some manufacturers, their own RAW conversion software will indeed perform such a feat. Note that I would not personally necessarily define that as a "better/great raw conversion tool" - there's many other criteria, and for many of us, once we shoot raw, we don't look at in-camera images/JPEG the same way any more. It is weird and a bit hoighty-toighty to describe, but when I look at scene either in real world or in camera nowadays, my brain automatically sees what can come out of it, i.e. the end result I want, rather than just straight pixels on camera. Or to put it other way, I don't bother to make JPEG come out in any particular way as long as I know I've captured the right data exposure wise, so there'd be zero value to me in a converter that mimicked camera JPEG. Note that many cameras actually encode a full JPEG they shot INSIDE the RAW. You may notice if you look at file in e.g. ACDsee, it'll first show exactly as you shot it because it uses this JPEG for preview; and then, what happened, a second later it changes, as it loads the RAW. There are tools to extract this JPEG if you so desire. Otherwise, if manufacturer doesn't have good raw converter, and you use e.g. Lightroom, you can setup a lot of settings to come up pretty close to what camera spits out. But as others have pointed out there may always be fine differences. The easiest solution of course is to use RAW+JPG shooting mode, bypassing the problem entirely :)