Something about RAW vs JPG...

The 'professional photographer' - those who earn their living as a photographer, has always recommended to shoot in RAW and claimed that it gives you more 'flexibility' in your post processing. I have always submit to this theory without any lab test to justify my believe, since the last assignment I had with a newly wedded couple we have shoot more than 2,000 RAW, and guess what? It almost killed my MBP, this has set me back numerous hours in front of my LCD and it is painstaking trying to be patient with the processing of the 2,000 RAW!!

Today I have decided to put my believe to a lab test, I would like to see if shooting RAW is really necessary for a Wedding Photographer like myself, and exactly how much 'flexibility' RAW really have given me to justify the set back in processing them??

Here are my results.

I took a underexposed photo which I shoot in RAW as followed:



And below is what happened when I set Exposure to +4 in Camera RAW Converter, noticed the contrast is a bit high here:



I then reset Exposure to +1.30 and Fill Light to +80, you will notice now the middle grey is much more balanced and the quality of the exposure is much higher now, I think if this is the only important shoot I managed to get in an assignment. I can still managed to give this quality to my client without much issue.



I then tried to duplicate the same quality of image using the original RAW, converted to JPG and use PS5 to adjust the Curve, Exposure and Brightness, below is my best effort:



As a result you can clearly see the noise level is very obvious, partly due to the contrast level and there are much dark area which I cant ger rid of worrying by doing os may further increas the noise level. The darker areas are demonstrate on the black clothes and the shadow on the carpet.

Well, I guess I will still shoot RAW for various Precious Moments and for others normal shoot I will remain with my favorite HDD and MBP friednly JPG!! ;-)