[LRflex] Re: RAW vs JPEG fine??

Alex,
I have an M8 and a DMR to go with my G5 Mac and when I got the DMR in 2005, I checked out Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom and would have loved to go with Aperture but Apple and Adobe are having, or were having, a spat and Aperture could not read the Leica native DNG files, so I chose Lightroom and have come to like it very much. I cannot compare the two because I've never used Aperture.
The range of adjustments in Lightroom seems to be an advance over my Photoshop C3 but so you'd be sort of at home, except that Adobe has created many new ways to alter an image, which I am just learning.
Lightroom takes some doing to learn (I'm still a basic learner after a year) and is geared to a straight through routine of import, sort and edit, develop, and output to print/slideshow/internet so I do a lot of back and forth with one image sometimes but with enough RAM it works fine. Someday I'll learn to do batches.
I always shoot in RAW and all my files are DNG, in which I do all my manipulation, mostly Adobe Auto WB abd Auto Tone with some other favorites and touching up of exposures, blacks, etc. When I want a jpeg to send I just save a copy as a jpeg, which uses Adobe's DNG- >jpeg conversion but it seems fine to me.
I suggest you download a free full version of Lightroom 2 and import a chip full of M8 DNG files to it and see what you think. 

That's my suggestion.

With all best wishes,

Bill


On Apr 27, 2009, at 5:06 AM, Alex Hurst wrote:


Hi all.
I know this is a hoary old chestnut, but a reiteration of your views for the benefit of a tyro would be much appreciated
I've just acquired a very nice ex-demo black M8 body which comes with Capture One, not to mention the full Leica Passport. It's now mated to my Nocti, which is probably my M8 lens of choice most of the time.
As I'm a Mac man, I tend to use iPhoto as my main photo library, and edit in Photoshop.
To date with my Nikon D200 I've been very happy with the quality of the fine JPEGs (printing to a maximum size of A4), and haven't even dabbled in RAW.
But, as Capture One appears to be highly-rated, is it really worth learning its ins and outs to extract ultimate quality from the M8 in RAW, or should I stick to fine JPEGs and my usual routine as with the Nikon?
I emphasise that I'm not going to be producing huge exhibition prints, and the M8, like the Nikon, seems to produce 10Mb files in fine JPEG mode.
With my current set-up, editing is very quick. I have the impression that RAW is a lot more time-consuming, but I may be mistaken. 

What do you guys do and why?

Best of light.

Alex
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