When Can You Feel Comfortable Shooting JPEGs?

Painting at the Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo, Texas (click to enlarge)

We have all repeatedly heard that we should never use the JPEG format to make our images.  The experts give us all the reasons why, such as:

—Having a JPEG is like having a cake already baked for you.  A RAW file is having the ingredients for making a cake, then allowing you to modify, add, subtract, and change those ingredients as well as change the cooking time to your liking.

—Using JPEG is like buying a Corvette and driving around in 2nd gear.  You lose control, features, quality and options that would be available to you in a RAW image.

—JPEG is only 8-bit while RAW is 16-bit.  Why would you artificially limit your image quality by using 8-bit?

—JPEG produces a compressed lossy file (the compression results in data being lost). Its like having a camera with as few as 1/3 of the pixels as the compression algorithms throw away a lot of the information contained in your image file.

—Subtleties might be lost due to the way JPEG identifies pixels, groups of pixels and pixel colors when compressing the file.

—Editing software using your computer with sophisticated image editors such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, DXO, Capture One Pro, Topaz PhotoFX Lab is much more powerful than the software in your camera and should be used instead of your camera's software processing your images.

—You may see banding in areas of smooth tonality, such as a smooth blue sky or other subtle tonal changes.

—And on and on and on.

These are all valid reasons for not using the JPEG format when photographing.  But...

There are times when using the JPEG format is perfectly acceptable and is used by millions of individuals successfully every day.  JPEG image files are certainly able to produce excellent image quality with one caveat.  It has to be the right circumstances.  Let's explore when using JPEG will work just fine for you.

1)   You have no need for the highest quality images.
2)   You need images immediately; you may need to send them wirelessly somewhere right now.
3)   There won't be much editing or manipulation necessary.
4)   There won't be complex color corrections necessary, such as with mixed color sources.
5)   There won't be drastic white balance corrections needed.
6)   You won't need to heavily crop.
7)   You won't need really large prints.
8)   The image is of normal contrast and fully within your histogram, i.e., no highlight or shadow recovery              needed.
9)   You only anticipate limited use such as everyday photographs taken in the course of your daily life
10) You are willing to accept automated camera corrections for lens distortion, chromatic aberrations and            vignetting.
11) You are willing to accept the image sharpening as done in the camera.
12) You want to use 'in-camera' special effects (cameras now have lots of special settings available)
13) You are almost out of memory card space an have no additional cards with you.

You see, JPEG is not a bad format.  It can serve you well.  But you will be better off using the RAW format when:
a)  You find less than optimum conditions under which you are photographing, or
b)  You need files only of the highest caliber, or
c)  You demand the absolute best your camera can produce, or
d)  You have made a mistake in setting controls on your camera or exposures settings and major corrections       are needed to save the file,

Those are the times when you cannot count on JPEG to have the quality you may need to fully optimize and realize the best quality from your image files.

When you do decide to utilize the JPEG file format, before you do, I suggest you do a few things to increase the probability that you will be fully happy with the resulting images.

First, thoroughly test your default jpeg camera settings so you know how the image files will look as a finished product.  Don't necessarily go by the camera's default settings.  They may be too contrasty, over sharpened, too saturated or just the opposite.  Camera manufacturers make default settings based upon what?  Who really knows?  Certainly not yours  or my particular likes and needs.

Take a variety of images in low contrast, normal contrast and high contrast conditions.  Make images in bad light, good light, early morning, late afternoon and in other less than optimum conditions. Change your JPEG settings from low (-) to normal (0) to high (+) numbers under the various conditions, WRITING DOWN your changes for each frame.  It is really easy to forget or confuse which image files were made with what settings.

Make some notes for future uses and have a small card laminated with your setting notes.  For example, in high contrast situations such as full summer sun, you may find that a -2 setting on your camera tames the contrast well and gives you an optimum image file.  You may find that, when looking at image files on the screen (I suggest also having a few 8X10" enlargements made because they will look totally different), your in-camera sharpening setting may look best at -1 or +1.  You may have different sharpening settings for images destined to be shared on the web versus printed.  If in doubt, sharpen less in-camera as you can always increase it later, but you can't decrease an image easily that is over-sharpened.  You may like low saturation, natural color, or highly saturated color.  You camera has all kinds of settings for any condition you may encounter.  Your camera also has settings to create a general 'look.'  It may be called landscape, portrait, natural, vivid, etc.  Try them all out in differing conditions to determine what you like under what conditions.  The idea is that you have to run some tests to find which settings are best.  Don't leave it to chance as you will be stuck with what the camera produces.  Good things come through patience, planning and hard work.  Do the work.

When it comes to color settings, use Adobe RGB and not sRGB in your camera.  The difference is like having a box of crayons with 25 colors versus a box of crayons with 250 colors.  Why artificially limit your color response and possibly degrade your image when all it takes is a setting change.  You can always change the image file to sRGB after editing or when sharing on the Internet.  And, I recommend using sRGB for images to be shared as most websites and most people's computer monitors are set to optimize sRGB image files.  But change the color settings afterwards.

Also, upon output, when your editing is completed, feel free to use the JPEG format when posting images on the web.  After your editing is done there is very little noticeable quality loss by exporting in JPEG.  All the prints I send out to a professional lab are in JPEG format with no visible image quality loss.  The ones I print at home are printed directly from a RAW file or a TIFF using ProPhoto RGB.  But that is just my preference.  I have had images as large as 20" X 24" (50 X 60cm) printed from my M4/3 files exported as JPEGs and they look fabulous!

What settings do I recommend when using jpeg in Photoshop for export?  For the web, I save at about 80% quality at 96 dpi.  For printing I save at 100% quality at 300 dpi.

My philosophy in making images is to always choose maximum quality for the settings in my camera as well as my editing software.  One can always reduce size, color space, pixel density, number of pixels, etc., but if you initially take your photographs on lower quality settings or change your color space to fewer colors or other parameters in your editing software, you can't get that quality back at a later time.  Ever!  For example, if you change your color space during editing so sRGB and your file from 16-bit to 8-bit, you have lost that extra information in your file forever once you save it with the lower quality settings.  Don't do it to your original files–ever.  Only do it if you need to for a specific reason on a specific copy of a file.

If you think through the use of the JPEG format and do a bit of research on how the format works, you may find that you can use it for specific situations and still will result in pleasing image files and less space used on your memory card or hard drive.  But it takes a bit of planning and work to achieve the best image quality. Good luck.

Thanks for looking.

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


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