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The other day I second shot a wedding with a friend. I shot all the pictures in RAW format. Sharing RAW though isn’t easy and wasn’t compatible with certain computers. So I was converting them to JPG just for easy sharing. However, the quality and lighting of the picture went down drastically once they were converted. I understand how RAW is better to shoot in, while JPG is easier to share, but is there any way to share easily and still have the good quality and lighting? Hopefully this makes sense…
Welcome to the forums, Carissa!
Sure, it’s a very valid question, and one that is not uncommon. Obviously we want our photos too look as good as they possibly can, so when they look substantially worse after conversion, we tend to wonder “what went wong”! 🙂
You’re right that RAW files are not good for sharing with your friends and family, we definitely need to convert to JPG for sharing. The main reason for shooting RAW in the first place is to have complete control over the processing of your photos so that they can look their best. Once you have edited/tweaked them to your satisfaction, then you convert them to JPG to be shared with others.
First of all, what software were you using to convert the photos from RAW to JPG? Many photographers (including myself) use Adobe Lightroom, but there are plenty of other options. Adobe Photoshop has a built in RAW editor called “Camera RAW” if I’m not mistaken. I recently came across Affinity Photo which was just recently released for Windows, and still has some bugs to be ironed out, but it has a RAW editor as well. Then of course there’s the free option, RawTherapee. If you use one of the ” *nix ” operating systems, then there’s Darktable, but most people are on Windows, so I usually recommend Windows software.
If you don’t have any of the above software, let me know, and we can work from there. If you do have any of that software, then you’re in luck! You’ll just need a few tips about RAW processing and exporting to JPG files, and you’ll be flying solo pretty soon. 🙂
Thank you, @Ezra Morley!
Well, I’m completely amateur in photography and don’t have any great software. For editing pictures all I have right now is Serif PhotoPlus4. To convert the photos, I merely found an free program online that I downloaded so that I could convert them all (Stepok RAW). I might be going about this all wrong… I just have a limited budget as of right now, so I’m trying to work with that. I’m not the one doing the official editing and such, but I’d still like to be able to share the pics I got right now with some other friends. Thanks for your help on this!
Ok, the reason you’re seeing a difference in “quality and lighting” is because your RAW photos are un-processed, while the JPGs were processed in-camera to look as good as possible. Here’s a quick example from one of my own photos:
On the left is the un-processed RAW file, on the right is the camera processed JPG file.
So when we convert our RAW files to JPG, we need to do at least some very basic editing to make sure that our JPG looks good after conversion. I often use a preset in Lightroom, so that with one click I can boost contrast and saturation, reduce highlights, and add some sharpening. Then I tweak the picture to be exactly as I like it.
If you don’t have cash to put down on paid software right now, then I guess free software is the way to go! If you open your RAW files in Stepok RAW, you’ll see that it gives you some very elementary editing tools, but I don’t believe that it will let you batch edit your photos, which is unfortunate. 🙁 Unless you want to go through and edit each RAW file and save it individually, we’ll have to try some more powerful software.
RawTherapee is plenty powerful enough to do the job, (with a bit of a learning curve to learn how to use it) 🙂
Question, what camera are you using? It’s very possible that it came with free RAW processing software that will bulk process them for you with the JPG processing settings applied. If you can tell me what model of camera you have, we can see if that is an option.
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I really appreciate your help on this; Thank you! =) My camera is Nikon D3300. I’ve been slowly working my way through editing all the pictures. It doesn’t take that long (which is nice) if my computer decides not to lock up too often. 😛
Sure thing! You probably already have a CD disk that came with your camera containing the free software that will convert your RAW photos. If not, you can download it for free from here: http://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/download/sw/96.html
Here’s the help page for doing batch adjustments with Nikon Capture NX-D: http://nikonimglib.com/ncnxd/onlinehelp/en/05_useful_03.html
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