I am a casual photographer and purchased a Nikon D3100 about 16 months ago.
I turned on shooting both RAW and JPEG.
90% of the photos taken are average at best so RAW is overkill. Example would be Christmas. I may take 300 pictures during the holiday which only a hand full would benefit from RAW processing. Most of the others would be good to keep but RAW not needed.
I am somewhat lazy in keeping up with new photos with regards to deleting, adjusting, rating, metadata etc.
Since RAW files are much larger than JPEGs, this adds a lot to the library.
I wanted to know if there is a better workflow to manage the photos without unnecessarily bloating the library.
I like to import all the photos from the SD card and go through them later. If I import RAW+JPEG pairs, I can’t delete just the RAW half, unless that feature has been added recently. So I import JPEGs and RAW separately and later I can delete the RAWs that are not needed, keeping just the JPEG version.
Thanks,
bdog
When shooting JPG, you basically set a standard setting for contrast, saturation, sharpening, etc., to be applied to every shot. With RAW you do this later in your RAW converter (in this case, Aperture). So do this, either:
1) ditch using RAW entirely since the bulk of your shots are fine anyway
2) ditch using JPG. Set yourself a default adjustment in Aperture to be applied to each RAW file as you import it. This is precisely what I do. Each image I import gets an automatic adjustment to contrast, a mild curve, sharpening, etc. This basically mimics what the camera does when you shoot JPG. If that default adjustment isn’t working for a particular photo I just change the adjustments later.
With Aperture there really are very few reasons to ever shoot RAW+JPG again.
Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas
Bill,
Thanks for the inputs.
I looked at the files and the JPG’s come in around 5.8MB and the NEF’s around 12MB.
I will probably switch to RAW only to ease the workflow.
Is there any draw backs to RAW only that I should be aware of?
bdog
Regards,
bdog
I don’t see any drawbacks to RAW myself once you get used to the flow. Especially after you settle down to a “standard” set of adjustments that you have applied to each photo upon import, thus cutting down your edit time substantially. The only real drawbacks are RAW files are larger (more import time, more disk space) and you can’t take your card out of your camera and directly print the images, you must go through a RAW converter (i.e Aperture) first. But I never take my CF cards straight to the camera store anyway. ;)
Bill Jurasz
Austin Texas