Every Image I Posted During The Month Of March Was From A JPEG

Two Crows (click to enlarge)
Olympus E-M1 Mark II; 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens @ 92mm; 1/640th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200
From an in-camera JPEG set to Olympus' Monochrome setting.

I wanted to try a little experiment during the month of March.  Every image I included in all of my posts during that month were either shot as a JPEG and one from a JPEG file from a film scan.  Every image shot as a JPEG was only sharpened with in-camera settings and no further sharpening or noise reduction was applied in Lightroom.  The only editing I did was what I would normally do on any image, such as brighten or darken it , lighten shadows or darken highlights, etc.  I wanted to see if anyone would notice any differences and would comment on a decrease in quality, lack of color, contrast, saturation, sharpness, detail, etc.  No one did.  

My little experiment showed me that every one of the images were as editable and looked as good as what I would have had with my RAW images.  In my opinion, the JPEGs produced by my Fujifilm and Olympus cameras are so good that they can be utilized for most all of my photography, according to my tests.  In fact, I like the in-camera sharpening of my Fujifilm JPEGs better than sharpening in LR.   But JPEGs won't work well in "all" cases.

One of my tests that I didn't show was of some experimental images I made through a window (looking north) showing the dark inside my home (no lights burning) and simultaneously outside on a bright sunny day.  I wanted to see what the difference in dynamic range was between RAW and JPEG in the same, really high contrast images.  The JPEGs almost did as well as the RAWs.  Not quite.  Those really high contrast situations are when you need as much dynamic range as you can get and you should choose RAW in those kinds of circumstances.  However, even the RAW images didn't do so well.  I did the experiment with my Fujifilm X-T3 but I'm not sure even a Sony A7III with a couple more stops of dynamic range would have been able to handle that level of brightness difference in one exposure.  In either case, my normal procedure in a situation like this would have been to invoke automatic bracketing, fire off three quick shots 2 stops apart, then switch the camera back to normal operating mode.  It only takes a second to do so.  I would then have blended the three exposures in LR, regardless of RAW or JPEG.

Try shooting JPEGs sometime.  You may be surprised.  This was just a little exercise for better understanding. 

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Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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