Reuters Bans RAW Photo Format (petapixel.com) 206
grcumb writes: Reuters is the latest agency to join the ranks of the technically clueless who think that ethical problems can be solved using technical means. They recently issued a circular to their contributors, stating in part: "In future, please don't send photos to Reuters that were processed from RAW or CR2 files. If you want to shoot raw images that's fine, just take JPEGs at the same time. Only send us the photos that were originally JPEGs, with minimal processing...." The problem they claim to be addressing is doctored images, but they don't explain how they plan to ensure that the JPEGs weren't simply exported from RAW files with their EXIF data altered, or heck, just altered as JPEG. They also assert that getting JPEG files straight from the camera is quicker, which is fair enough. Lots of professionals shoot with RAW+JPEG at newsworthy events. They can send the JPEGs off quickly to meet the first deadline, then process the RAW files at leisure for higher quality publications.
You did Something vs. You didn't do Anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You did Something vs. You didn't do Anything (Score:5, Insightful)
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People are fucking retarded sometimes.
That's a bit harsh. Everyone knows you can't edit jpg's, so problem solved.
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jpg's what?
Who is this jpg, and what do they possess?
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Who is JPG? It's the Holy Trinity: Jesus, Photos, and God. Come to us, learn more!
Our motto: Pics or it didn't happen!
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One only needs to look at the US presidential election to see this in progress. Candidates spout "we'll do something" promises regardless of whether that will actually work (or whether it would even be legal to do) and those candidates' poll numbers increase. They are seen as men of action and people on the other side are criticized for "not doing anything" even if they are doing something, but their action is more measured. Big bold actions get people's attention regardless of effectiveness.
Re:You did Something vs. You didn't do Anything (Score:4)
And it's an insult to my intelligence.
It shouldn't be, since you were too dumb to RTFA. This has nothing to do with preventing doctoring. They are simply trying to streamline their workflow by standardizing on a single format.
Did you RTFA before you called other people too dumb to RTFA?
A Reuters spokesperson has confirmed this policy change with PetaPixel, and says that the decision was made to increase both ethics and speed.
If they only wanted to streamline their workflow by standardizing on a single format, they could have just said "send us JPG's", rather than pretending that a JPG that says it came from a Canon EOS-1D actually did come from a Canon EOS-1d and wasn't post processed and faked to look like it came from the camera.
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"Something must be done! This is something! Therefore, this must be done!"
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Also the followup: "You oppose doing this something? Obviously, you don't want to fix this problem at all? Why do you want this problem to remain unfixed?"
Add in a "why do you hate America" if said problem is political in nature.
Re:You did Something vs. You didn't do Anything (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You did Something vs. You didn't do Anything (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't even need to post-process anything to make a fake photo.
Just choose the right position to hide context from the photo, the right angle for emotional effect or simply ask people to do something or rearrange some objects.
One could say that by even merely being present, a photographer influences the content of his photos.
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Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes: http://filmmakeriq.com/images/calvin-hobbes-cameras-lie/
Also, I'm guilty of this. Taking photos of my boys and carefully making sure the mess of toys isn't in the frame so that our house doesn't look like the mess it is.
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One could say that by even merely being present, a photographer influences the content of his photos.
Especially with cat photos.
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True. I have a picture of a sign at a farm that advertises "Certified Weed." Then another picture taken two steps forward, where something no longer blocks the rest of the message, and you can see it says they're actually selling "Certified Weed Free Hay."
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Efficacy of treatment (Score:2)
I suspect that you misremember or that the one who told you this was lying. At least, I can't find any information that confirms this. To the contrary, this book uses the Vietnam war as evidence for the importance of treatment for survival.
https://books.google.nl/books?... [google.nl]
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I forget where (it may have been something to do with superglue) but the thing I read/saw was that medics were taught that loss of blood pressure was bad, and so they prioritised giving transfusions. The resulting increase in pressure tended to pop partially formed clots, thus slightly sabotaging the body's own repair mechanism.
If they are Doctoring, WHY do they work there? (Score:5, Interesting)
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So, if you really want to shoot RAW and process it, now you just have to be savvy enough to know how to doctor the metadata (which, simply knowing that metadata in your photos exists + Google should be a short exercise to teach yourself.)
Question out of curiosity: Do Reuters et.al. accept formats like .PNG?
Terrible summary (Score:5, Informative)
They're not trying to prevent "doctored" images.
The original memo reads:
I’d like to pass on a note of request to our freelance contributors due to a worldwide policy change.. In future, please don’t send photos to Reuters that were processed from RAW or CR2 files. If you want to shoot raw images that’s fine, just take JPEGs at the same time. Only send us the photos that were originally JPEGs, with minimal processing (cropping, correcting levels, etc).
And a follow-up quote reads
While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.
Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
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and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
But it's not "JPG not RAW," it's "originally JPG." If it's workflow-related, and the input to Reuters needs to be JPG, why would they care whether the JPG conversion took place in the camera or in off-camera RAW-to-JPG software?
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Because it takes time for the photog to convert the image in off-camera RAW-to-JPG software. It is faster to just give them the JPG right off the camera. They even said why: IT IS FASTER TO GET THE IMAGES TO THE CLIENT.
Horsepucky. Even with a Nikon D800 - one of the highest megapixel 'professional' cameras out there, it takes perhaps 10-15 seconds for any reasonably spec'd laptop to process a RAW file into a JPEG. And as a further bonus, each RAW file carries a (smallish) JPEG built into it that can be extracted automatically.
So speed is not an important aspect of this argument.
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Interesting idea but faulty like hell. The photographer took some important photos in poor lighting condition. The JPEGs came out unreadable but he was able to restore the content by processing the RAWs. Nope, don't wanna.
The photographer spent three days in war zone, evenings in the bunker spent developing RAWs of what he took during the day. Finally he gets a courier to deliver the SD card to his contact out of the war zone and send it to Reuters. Nope, these were obtained from RAWs, we don't want them.
So
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In the real world photographers use RAW. Or do you only use cameras in video games?
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Interesting)
While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.
Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.
Yes, they're being euphemistic and mashing over-processing in with outright manipulation, because I doubt Reuters would win a lot of friends among the professional photography establishment if they implied that their contributors were a bunch of crooks.
But the point of the thing is that 'minimal editing' has nothing to do with the format you capture your images in. And furthermore, it's easier to track 'minimal editing' with RAW than it is in JPEG, because editing tools actually maintain an audit trail of sorts. The bottom line is that the measure does nothing to get them where they want to go, except in the minds of a few not-so-sophisticated editors.
Full disclosure: I'm media director of the newspaper of record in a small country, a news photographer who has contributed to wire services, and a geek. I also wrote this submission. And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow. In fact, JPEG is a pain the ass compared to RAW, especially when you're targeting multiple media with the same image. Because the shot you upload to your website is going to be significantly different in size, colour and compression from the one that goes to pre-press. If you take them both from the same canonical source (or Nikonical source, if that's your poison), then life is much, much easier.
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"I'm media director of the newspaper of record in a small country, a news photographer who has contributed to wire services, and a geek"
Ok, then. So, asking to the geek, I understand "raw" means "unprocessed". Does all cameras spit out the same raw format? Or by "raw" you don't really mean "raw" but "whatever happens to be Canon's or Nikon's native format; don't bring me any other than that"? Because if it's the second option you, as a geek, already know that kind of lock in is always a bad advise, don'
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Does all cameras spit out the same raw format?
Oh no. God no. GOD DAMN IT no. Every fucking camera puts out a different RAW file. That's why Adobe Lightroom has a new version every week: to keep up with manufacturers' new camera releases.
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aaaand quite a few of them don't even contain metadata that says what camera they were taken with so you have to pull down the right one from a menu, and in certain cases guess what camera the photographer used.
I could understand an editor who wouldn't want to deal with this crap.
But in this case it's a bit different. The photographer sends you a nice JPEG. And you say "nope, it was made from RAW with Lightroom, we don't want it. Send us the JPEG your camera created directly."
Re: Terrible summary (Score:2)
Each time a new RAW format comes out, how many machines does your IT staff have to update? And how frequently does this happen?
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If you take them both from the same canonical source (or Nikonical source, if that's your poison)
It's barely 10:00 here and I'm already convinced this is the best thing I will read all day.
Seriously. Thank you.
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No he's not missing a thing. It takes seconds to process a RAW file to JPEG. Seconds. It takes longer to figure out WHICH files to send than to process them.
As grcumb points out, this whole thing has a huge dose of cognitive dissonance. What Reuters says and what Reuters ostensibly wants are diametrically opposed.
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And they don't want to deal with your JPEGs you have developed from RAW for them either?
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"And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow."
You missed the entire point of the requirement: TO GET THE IMAGES FASTER TO THE CLIENT.
Did you miss the part where I say I run a daily newspaper? I know the argument for speed. I also know it's bogus, because I live with deadlines every day. And I like RAW better, because I save time when it comes to managing the image across multiple media and platforms.
In those rare cases when even minutes matter, any self-respecting photographer will shoot in RAW+JPEG. Heck, in rare cases, I'll just shoot from my phone and upload instantaneously. But those are exceptional cases, and don't constitute a comp
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I wonder if the JPEG recommendation comes from size and archival requirements, plus lawsuits related to decoding all of the various RAW formats.
If you're paying a vendor to write and maintain your photojournal archive system that's expected to hold the next 100 years worth of photos, supporting 30 year old RAW formats with each new release is going to not really be worth it. It may be easier to have all the photos in a standard format. There are likely new cameras coming on the market that their sys
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I wonder if the JPEG recommendation comes from size and archival requirements, plus lawsuits related to decoding all of the various RAW formats.
JPEG is a decent standard, and EXIF metadata makes archiving and retrieval more practicable. But I believe that RAW formats are pretty well understood and widely documented. It's in the camera manufacturer's interest to see these formats well and widely supported. Also, it's just sensor data, ultimately. The data structure is fairly straightforward. I really doubt that reverse engineering these formats would be terribly difficult. And I suspect that, if anything, it will get easier and faster over time, rat
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"But I believe that RAW formats are pretty well understood and widely documented. It's in the camera manufacturer's interest to see these formats well and widely supported. Also, it's just sensor data, ultimately. The data structure is fairly straightforward."
Well, I'm not an expert but I know something about the software industry. On one hand, you don't want your format to be easily accessible if you think you can benefit from it: see office document formats, for instance. I can imagine a big camera vend
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Your daily newspaper pales in comparison. We are talking about GLOBAL SPEED. They deliver pictures to clients all over the world. Tens of thousands of pictures every day. Clients expect pictures within an hour of the event. THEY DON'T WANT you to manage the image across multiple media and platforms. They just want the JPG from your camera. Fast. They don't want your 20 MB RAW image. They want 8MB JPG. Fast.
Newspapers have websites these days. Everyone works at, uh 'GLOBAL SPEED'. I've covered global news events and delivered scoops. I still shoot RAW, and if Reuters doesn't like it, I'm sure AFP will be happy to have my pics. Frankly, I think wire services in general are ripe for a tech invasion. Reuters' cranial anal insertion is just more evidence of the need for it.
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Considering that no software exists for writing RAW images other than the software built into the cameras, it is safe to say that you cannot submit a RAW image that has been "enhanced". You can either submit a JPEG rendition of the RAW file with enhancements or you can submit a RAW file. Sane people would say, "Submit both, and let the end consumer decide whether they want to accept the original photographer's vision
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"A Reuters spokesperson has confirmed this policy change with PetaPixel, and says that the decision was made to increase both ethics and speed."
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More to the point, you can't readily doctor RAWs. So if their goal is ethics, they should require a RAW file to be submitted with every JPEG, so that they can later verify that it really is possible to get that JPEG from that RAW file. If their goal is to doctor reality and distort the truth, then by all means, require photographers to submit only JPEG images that can be readily faked.
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Photos are not reality anyways (Score:2)
There are already so many parameters that a photograph can use to tell their own story (framing, focal length, depth of field, ...) that a few touches such as correcting white balance or exposure would pale in comparison. In fact these touches can be used to make the picture actually more faithful, by removing camera artefacts.
There is a good example somewhere where people complained against advertisers and as evidence submitted a picture taken with telephoto lens, making their city look cluttered with bill
Size & standards, not doctoring (Score:5, Insightful)
I am pretty sure the real issue is file size and standards, not doctoring. As manufacturers keep ridiculously upping sensor MP size, photo sizes continue to balloon to larger and larger sizes. RAW files are notoriously huge and non-standard. The extra processing they are referring to is probably just the need to convert those various RAW files back to JPEG, which takes/wastes time/energy by their staff.
You would have to be a pretty big idiot to think that JPEG files are harder to doctor than RAW files. Any photo format can be used when exporting a doctored image... has nothing to do with how it is saved.
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I'll be happy when my camera has enough gigapixels of resolution and terrabytes of storage that I can shoot 120fps lossless video through a fisheye lens and turn around and capture the equivalent of a 1000mm telephoto image on a 35mm film camera from anywhere in the lens view.
Until then, (all else like noise, light sensitivity, color balance, etc. being equal) more pixels is better. My first digital camera had 320x240 resolution and could only shoot decently in full sunlight, but don't get the sun or a str
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>Until then, (all else like noise, light sensitivity, color balance, etc. being equal) more pixels is better.
But they are not equal, so that is the crux. Consumer ignorance has driven a megapixel craze at the expense of pixel *quality*. I am not opposed to increasing quality (and even number of pixels, as long as they are not at the expense of anything else).
But again, there is no standard for RAW- every manufacturer does something different. So the news agency likely has to convert them all into so
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Yeah? Give me a high resolution over sampled image any day over a lower resolution sensor with higher pixels. Noise reduction works better on over sampled images and the idea of photon capture being critically better on larger pixel sizes died when they managed to significantly reduce the gaps between sensors.
People like you were the ones who said camera manufacturers couldn't do what they have proven they were capable of. People like you were the ones who said cameras like the D800 would be outperformed by
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Reuters also deals with video. Video files are so much larger than plain stills that worrying about such file sizes seems absurd. Next up: Reuters limits video files to 100 x 60 pixels?
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It is actually the other way around. Other than in-camera, although you can write image metadata to RAW files, it isn't possible to write modified image data (or at least libraries for doing so don't exist to the best of my knowledge). And even if that were not true, the format of RAW files is specific t
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>JPEG is a lossy format, every pixel affects the colour of its surrounding pixels
You know, that is a very good point.
Not really a big deal (Score:2)
Most cameras will let you shoot both Raw & jpg at the same time. Some pro cameras even have dual memory cards which will allow you to store raw on one ( preferably the bigger / faster one ) and jpg on the other. Grab your shot, submit it quickly via .jpg and use your raw file to impress folks with your post production skills later on :D
The format requirement change really only does two things:
1) It cuts down storage requirements significantly. Full size 14-bit Raw image on my Nikon D4s is almost 20M
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The format requirement change really only does two things:
1) It cuts down storage requirements significantly. Full size 14-bit Raw image on my Nikon D4s is almost 20MB. Full size .jpg at the fine setting is 8MB.
( The D4s only has a 16mp sensor. Crank that up a bit and the file sizes get rather ludicrous. )
2) Separates the pros from the amateurs. A pro knows how to get a good shot without resorting to post to fix things they should have got right in the camera. ( like exposure and white balance )
The first point is reasonable. The RAW files for my D800 are BIG. I can't keep more than about six months' shooting on my computer at any given time, and have to hive the rest off to external RAID. And I'm just one photographer who might shoot a couple thousand shots on a busy week. Reuters has slightly greater storage and archival issues than that. :-)
BUT... when you insist on JPEG straight from the camera, you're also effectively discarding keyword tags, caption, title, and other key data about the file,
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processing time reserved for (Score:2)
Save as BMP (Score:4, Funny)
Clueless J-school idiots (Score:5, Informative)
They have no idea how real photography works. JPG is a 'final' format. You capture an image on an SLR as RAW so you get all of the information the sensor can give you, and then you process it to pull the JPGs you want to give to the user of your shots. In journalism, many photographs are taken under marginal conditions, such as four stops below optimum in a sandstorm. Shooting RAW gives you the most latitude to recover usable images that might give us the ability to identify a terrorist. You can apply high dynamic range processing to a single RAW frame to show detail not recoverable any other way, and given a bracket of five RAW frames one stop apart, even handheld, you can postprocess them into a great picture.
Yes, today's journalism photography is being done with many devices that shoot JPG as their native mode, and as any photographer will tell you, the best camera in the world is the one you have with you. But anyone who prohibits high-detail RAW imagery is a person who does not deserve to be in journalism. Manufacturers have responded to the phone-photography challenge with formats like Micro Four Thirds, which gives you SLR versatility in a compact body and lens format that you can take to wherever the news is being made.
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There's a downside to identifying terrorists? Please explain.
News photographs have been used for intelligence ever since the medium existed.
Speed is the real reason (Score:2)
They want a JPG so that they can get it up on the website and social media sites as fast as possible. It pays for them to be the first to get a picture or story out. They don't want a photographer to spend the time converting the image on their computer.
But what is perfectly fine is to shoot in RAW + JPG and send in the JPG right away. Then after the event the photographer would take the best shot or two and do the minimal amount of adjustments allowed to make the image more appropriate for newspapers or
Great idea (Score:3)
The whole purpose of shooting raw images is to do advanced processing later. However, any such processing involves creative choice which alters the image to the taste of the person doing the processing. It's easy to alter the white point and have some journalistically important details lost in the shadows.
Also in a high stakes case suspected forgery, it may be possible to detect forged images by looking at minute noise and encoding choices made by a particular camera model. Faking these details well enough to fool the experts would be beyond the expertise of most would-be forgers.
Of course, Reuters could ask for RAW files themselves and have even more fidelity/authentication potential. But those files are huge, many journalists do not have a fast internet connection where they work, and the publisher would need expertise on RAW workflows.
All in all, I think it's a reasonable decision and will be successful against unintentional/unconscious alterations and causual forgery.
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Wrong. Jpeg *loses* important detail. There's a lot of information that is available in a 14-bit uncompressed file that is discarded in the conversion to an 8-bit file with lossy compression. You got that amazing once-in-a-lifetime shot but it was underexposed a stop or two. No problem in raw when jpeg might well be totally unusable. Too bad for Reuters.
Every camera that a serious photojournalist would use has a myriad number of built-in features from HDR to monochrome to white-balance and many other color
This has technical merit (Score:2)
If only they applied the same rules to words (Score:2)
I cannot fathom any explanation as to why they press so hard on presenting photos and video as is, but feel free to be as creative as possible with the text and words. My guess is that cameramen are considered second class citizens as opposed to the anchors, and they actively want to prevent them from doing anything creative.
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What's a JPEG at -90% compression? Whoa. Mind blown.
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I can make you a JPEG file that is -90% smaller.
Detailed instructions and all necessary code will be embedded in the IPTC comment tag.
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Step 1: Create a large blob of irrelevant code and instructions.
Step 2: Store it in an EXIF tag.
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No. Processing raw files involves more than just compression, it includes things like demosaicing and setting white balance.
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Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?
Not even remotely. JPEG does not have the native sensor data regardless of how little compression you apply. It isn't the native sensor bitdepth, it isn't the native sensor resolution without interpolation, and even the best quality JPEG is crap compared to a RAW original.
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No. JPEG is 8-bit color, while RAW is typically 12 or 14 bits with expanded dynamic range and gamut. This makes RAW useful in case you get the exposure or the white balance wrong, among other things.
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RAW files are a dump of the camera sensor. They generally require processing to produce something useful (although both Canon and Nikon RAW files now include a JPEG embedded into the file format for preview). The reason why you would want a dump of the camera sensor is so that you can do post-production work like adjusting the white balance, adjust the exposure, etc. JPEGs already have this data "baked" and product much poorer results when trying to do this post-production work.
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You can think of it, very basically, as Reuters insisting on a 4x6 physical print, rather than wanting the negative.
In this analogy, it's easier to work with the print than the negative, but if you want to scan it back to digital, blow it up, whatever, you're losing quality. With the negative, you have more work to do, but you have a higher-quality starting point, and you can do all sorts of work with it and get far better results than by working from the 4x6 print.
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They want to stop people from screwing with photos...but their solution is basically to say "let the camera make its best guess at what you were trying to capture". So instead of spending time in the dark room trying to get the best print possible (starting from a raw file), you are handing it over to to a pimply kid to run through an automated machine (letting the camera guess a
Re: Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image? (Score:5, Informative)
Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?
It would be close but not exact. The way you would get close is to set the 8x8 quantization matrix to all 1's. In JPEG compression [wikipedia.org], the image is divided into 8x8 blocks, discrete cosine transformed, elementwise divided by an 8x8 quantization matrix, rounded to the nearest integer, and then (usually) Huffman encoded. The primary problem with being perfectly lossless is that the DCT produces a fractional result. So even if you set the quantization matrix to all 1's, the rounding step would lose information.
Care to enlighten me as to how one sets jpeg compression to 0%?
It's not easy to do in most image editors; even the highest (12) quality setting in Photoshop has quantization [impulseadventure.com]. You can do it in ImageMagick [imagemagick.org], however.
Also, no, RAW formats are not simply uncompressed, but largely unprocessed data as well (certainly less processed than what you get from an out of camera tif or jpf.)
Raw formats are indeed compressed [lclevy.free.fr]; they're just losslessly compressed.
Finally, there is a true lossless JPEG [wikipedia.org] format, though it is distinct from the usual JPEGs.
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And thus, this is exactly my problem with "JPEG ONLY"... The camera does quite a bit more than just apply white balance and compress down to a JPEG from the sensor RAW data. Tonal curves, lens correction, sensor correction, sharpening, and a whole bunch of other processing happens during this conversion process. Most of what can be done in Lightroom can be saved as presets (using other tools) and loaded directly into the camera to be applied to a JPEG automatically on capture. Is this then wrong, because th
Re: Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would suspect that "often" is really "always". A typical Canon RAW file, for example, has 14 bits per pixel. Because of the extra precision, the effective dynamic range of a RAW file is dramatically wider than the dynamic range of a JPEG image. For example, if you have the following samples in the RAW image:
65500, 65532, 65515, 65533, 65473, 65535
And you convert that to JPEG, you'll get:
255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255
Iff you later need to pull the highs down to make them less blown out, if you're starting with the RAW image, you'll get a fairly accurate rendition of those values (up to the limits of the sensor), whereas if you start with the JPEG image, you'll get white blotches, because there's no detail there to recover. For recovering highlights and/or shadows, JPEG doesn't even come close to RAW, and can't. There's just too much data lost.
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Also, no, RAW formats are not simply uncompressed
In fact they often are. They're losslessly compressed. And they use JPEG-like algorithms to do it!
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To answer in a more technical way (than "use ImageMagick").
JPEG encoding inherently can be completely lossless. 8x8 pixel squares of pixel values are converted to 8x8 matrices of frequency components - transforming the representation of data as a superposition of specific sine waves of fixed set of frequencies and parametrized amplitudes. Due to small area and range of values being covered, this mapping is lossless - the data is sufficient to recreate the exact image, errors of the "floating point nature" o
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Care to enlighten me as to how one sets jpeg compression to 0%?
Why did such a stupid question get modded up?
It's simple: you open your digital camera's settings menu, find the option to control the JPEG compression level, and set it to 0%.
Jesus, even my shitty old Android phone has a camera app that allows you to do that!
My camera has low-mid-high compression levels. Which one is 0%? Are any of them zero? I don't even see that compression level in my image editor, the closest I have is "quality level: 100" ,which is not nearly the same as 0% compression.
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If Reuters no longer accepts images in a particular format, it's their business.
Exactly. So send them JPEGs and STFU.
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Bet you anything they've a managed workflow system and their solution can't deal with raw files.
It's actually worse than that: they aren't merely saying, "Don't send us raw files" (Note no caps -- "raw" isn't an abbreviation); they're saying "Don't send us anything that was even *processed* from raw files." It's as if the raw processing algorithms in the camera are somehow sacrosanct, but the equivalent algorithms run in Lightroom is suspect.
In fact, I think it would be harder to doctor a RAW format because all image sensors have random imperfections, their own physical "fingerprint" that can be traced back to a specific camera. (These imperfections are fixed in processing. All serious cameras have a built-in imperfection reference map created during manufacture and testing. More serious cameras let you update this manually too) Not to mention doctoring a RAW would require inanimate knowledge of the imaging sensor.
I'm not sure what you're talking about by "imperfection reference map" -- do you mean dust delete data [canon.com]? That isn't built-in; you need to take a reference photo
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Reuters doesn't want the hassle of dealing with RAW files. They're huge. The formats are many. They also require extra handling. They also don't need them for their uses.
No, that's wrong. Reuters doesn't want images generated from RAW files. That's something entirely different.
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Biotech isn't tech? That's news to me. Somebody call Reuters.
Okay, here's one:
Q: You're standing near a railroad track. A train is heading towards a group of blind people. You do not have time to run and get them off the tracks. You're standing near a switch, however, and can redirect the train to a different track. Unfortunately, on that second track lies a small child, strapped into a car seat. Do you pull the switch and kill the person who would not have died otherwise, or leave the switch and al
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Except you're in Belgium, and they don't understand what you're saying. [wikipedia.org]
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Need a real-time voice translator then. Another tech thingy.
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FTFY.
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If that were true, they would require submission of RAW files, which are exceptionally hard to doctor, rather than requiring you to submit only JPEGs, which are exceptionally easy to doctor.