A raw dilemma (and why I keep shooting raw most of the time)

In the Nikon world, with my old D70s, I switched to shooting raw only after about 6 months (well, to be precise, the first three months I used a borrowed D70, then my own D70s and with my own camera I switched to raw after 2 months... in the end, thats 6 months after beginning with a DSLR). That was mid 2007.

In the meantime, I switched to the Fuji S5pro, and it has that unbelievable dynamic range (just check out dxomark.com , the S3pro and S5pro still share the lead in the dynamic range) and an excellent JPEG engine that really does an excellent job in taming that huge dynamic range into a single photo.

But nevertheless, the full advantage is only preserved by shooting raw. Here's a RAF, imported into Lightroom with the Adobe Standard camera preset, and cropped to 5:4 aspect ratio:

The sky looks hopelessly blown out, and in fact the highlight clipping warning of the camera (the only thing that I use since the histograms of the S5pro are simply crap, they're not just tiny but give no indication of clipped highlights) showed all of the upper region blinking.

I'm using the highlight clip warning all the time because thats the most important thing for me. I can always make a photo darker, but blown out highlights are dead white pixels (of course I can always make a photo brighter, too, but that means sacrificing signal-2-noise ratio and introducing more noise than necessary - I expose to the right).

Now, lets have a look at the image AFTER I edited in Lightroom (exposure compensation -1 globally, then a graduated filter with another -1.6 exposure compensation in the upper 2/3 - a total exposure compensation of more than 2 1/2 stops in the upper area!):


Yes... the only thing that is really blown out in the photo is the disc of the sun! Now, thats part of the Fuji dynamic range magic - but the real issue I want to show with this post is: there's no reliable preview for the quality of the raw data in ANY camera. EVERY camera shows you the JPEG on the display. Even if you don't shoot raw+JPEG but only store the raw data, the camera creates a JPEG and embeds it in the raw file as a preview. And its thats preview that you see on your camera's display. Its that JPEG preview that triggers the blinking highlight display. Its that JPEG preview that is used for the histograms.

This is a real problem because we can not reliably judge the raw data with the camera's display. However, there's something we can do: configure the JPEG engine of the camera to render the flattest JPEG thats possible. Only this way you'll have a highlight warning that is somewhat accurate.

In the Fuji world, this means: the camera must be set to 400% dynamic all the time, and the contrast (Fuji calls it "gradiation" in the menu) must be set to "ORG". In reality, using 400% dynamic is not such a good idea because at the very limit of the dynamic range, you'll get false colors (a magenta or cyan tint in the brightest areas). I'm using 300% so that the highlight warning triggers 1/2 stop earlier than the actual limit.

For other cameras (without extra dynamic range), the contrast must be set as flat as possible (in my D70s, that was -3 IIRC). This of course means that, if you were shooting raw+JPEG until now, you'll get JPEGs out of cam that look, erm... really really weak (which is a pity for me, because the JPEG engine of the Fuji is really excellent and I often shot raw+JPEG), but in return you'll have a highlight warning that tells you something that is closer to the "raw truth". :-)