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Dartful Dodger:

--- Quote from: Ed_McCarron on November 02, 2011, 03:20:11 pm ---I've swung to a Canon T1i, and may never go back.
--- End quote ---

I've got a T1i too.

What quality to you use for photos?

I've been leaving my compressions set to raw. But I fill up my SD card really quickly and not being able to see the thumbnails is also a pain in the butt. I have yet to take a picture I want to print.  I just view my photos on the computer and I think the higher quality photos look compressed and blurry when looking at them on a monitor.

I've been thinking about just using a high quality jpeg. Just curious what setting/resolution you (and others) are using.

stu33:
I can chime in here.  RAW mode is EXACTLY what the sensor sees, only adjusted for white balance.  JPEG shots will always have copious amounts of brightness/contrast/etc..plus sharpening done in-camera.  That being said, I only shoot in RAW, and looooooove (I can't say this enough) Adobe Lightroom.  99% of my editing /processing is done in Lightroom, with Photoshop only used for special things, artful type stuff.

If you're going to shoot in RAW, be ready to put some work into processing, where with the JPEG settings, this is already done for you in-camera.

Ed_McCarron:
Until I invest in more cards (4G says it'll hold like 100 raw shots...) I shoot 15mp.  My stuff only ends up on websites anyway.  I just like being able to crop out the 50% of the pic I don't want to get a decent shot.

The few I have printed (at a whopping 4x6...  :P ) came out beautiful, even with the jpg compression.

Blanka:

--- Quote from: stu33 on November 02, 2011, 04:10:57 pm --- That being said, I only shoot in RAW, and looooooove (I can't say this enough) Adobe Lightroom.  99% of my editing /processing is done in Lightroom, with Photoshop only used for special things, artful type stuff.
--- End quote ---


Just for your interest:
With Lightroom and a Nikon, you have worse quality after processing the RAW then when you go with the JPEG output. The only programs capable of equal quality to the in-house JPEG processing of a Nikon are NX2 (the Nikon RAW program, sucky in UI, but unbeaten in quality), and CaptureOne.
With Canon, you don't even know what quality of prepossessing you are missing when using one with Lightroom. (I forgot, you can turn a Canon image to 16-bit TIF and then get it through NX2 for equal quality)

stu33:
I'm not going to get into a tit-for-tat on Canon vs. Nikon.  I've seen those arguments reach the pseudo-religious fervor that Mac vs. Windows arguments achieve.  I'm sure everyone has their favorite ways, and there are good and bad features for both.  I'm a Canon user as my first DSLR was a Canon.  I've bought into that system.  If my first had been Nikon, I'd be a Nikon guy.  You learn to work within the quirks.  Like, for instance, when Nikon moved their auto-focus motors from inside the lenses to inside the camera body on the more consumer-minded models...I can't imagine making a call like that, basically removing auto-focus capabilities from every single established lens that you've already sold.  But for a Nikon user, that probably wasn't a big deal.  As a Canon user, the complete crap that was Canon's higher-ISO quality was a serious PITA for me for a very long time, and made me actually very good with Photoshop at mitigating the noise effects, although they've since improved that considerably.  My 7D is usable at least to 16800 (I haven't tried anything at 32000 yet).

As for in-camera jpeg quality, personally, I will almost never use in-camera jpeg for anything (except for high-volume wedding shooting, and only on the secondary camera), I just like to use Lightroom for processing, plus the amazing ease with which you can publish/export/catalog the pictures, and it's integration with Photoshop, which I enjoy.  I also don't use jpeg for anything but pictures being posted to the web, I keep everything else in tiff.  You can see, then, how jpeg quality isn't really important to me. 

This same Lightroom/Photoshop process would work with ANY CAMERA.  Lightroom and Photoshop are camera agnostic.  If Lightroom/Photoshop feel particularly daunting, Google's Picasa is a great gateway drug to computer photo processing, and can handle most camera RAW formats.  It is quite simple and capable for beginners.

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