I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2-megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?
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In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google’s WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more — all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.

But all of these advantages come at a price, support for the WebP image format outside of your browser is far from universal. Google set it up as a Web format that, for now, is not supported by any of the major operating systems natively. And so, after the switch, when Facebook users tried to download a funny photo or the vacation pics their friends decided to share through Facebook, they wound up with un-viewable WebP files. Read more…

Artist Alan Belcher is known for pioneering a genre of art known as “photo-object” in which the disciplines of photography and sculpture are fused and explored in different ways. His latest piece is titled “_____.jpg”, and consists of 125 ceramic sculptures of the ubiquitous Apple JPG icon. Each one was manufactured in China and then signed, numbered, and dated. They’re currently on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan. You can see a close-up view of the tile here.

(via Doobybrain and jockohomo)

Back in August we featured a service called JPEGmini, which gives anybody the ability to shrink their photos up to 5-times in size without any visible quality difference — a substantial claim, but one that the service seemed to live up to quite well (we use it regularly). Read more…

While looking into the new compression service JPEGmini yesterday, the following statement caught my eye in an interview they did with Megapixel:

[...] sometimes you increase the quality setting in Photoshop and the actual quality of the image is reduced…

I had never heard of that before, so I decided to dig a little deeper.
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JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel:

Our technology analyzes each specific photo, and determines the maximum amount of compression that can be applied to the photo without creating any visual artifacts. In this way, the system compresses each photo to the maximum extent possible without hurting the perceived quality of the photo.

You can test out the technology on your own photos through the service’s website.
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One of huge benefits of shooting in RAW is that RAW files usually have considerably more dynamic range than a JPG. This means that details in the shadows and highlights of an image that would otherwise be lost if shooting JPG are stored in the RAW file, and able to be recovered if needed during post-processing. Reddit user Jake Kelly shot the photo on the left of his friends in a dark movie theater, severely underexposing the image but avoiding hand-shake with a shutter speed of 1/60. A quick adjustment in Lightroom helped him recover a ton of detail that definitely wouldn’t be possible had he been shooting in JPG (try taking the JPG on the left and getting the result on the right).

For a more in-depth look at this topic, you should read the “Dynamic Range & Exposure Compensation” section of the RAW tutorial over on Cambridge in Colour.

(via Reddit)

Image credits: Photographs by Jake Kelly and used with permission

Shooting in JPG mode is convenient because you instantly have a file you can throw onto the Internet, but if you’re serious about photography, you might want to think about shooting in RAW if you aren’t already. The reason is that only shooting JPG is the equivalent of letting the camera make a print for you and then tossing the negative — something film photographers would never do. Here’s a simple diagram by Haje Jan Kamps and Reddit user jannne to help you understand the differences.

Here’s a photograph I randomly snapped on a tennis court a few days ago:

It was taken with my Sony DSC-P200, a 7.2 megapixel point-and-shoot camera released back in 2005. Compared to my Canon 40D, the image quality is much less contrasty, and much duller. One of the things I like to do to quickly and easily improve photos from the P200 is to process the JPEGs in Adobe Camera Raw as though they were RAW files (though it’s less flexible compared to if you shot a RAW file).

In Adobe Bridge, you can right click the photograph and click “Open in Camera Raw…”, or press Ctrl+R.

This allows you to use the sliders and tools provided by ACR rather than processing the JPEG in Photoshop.

For this particular photograph, I made the following edits:

White Balance and Exposure : Unchanged. I liked the warm look of the photo, and the exposure looked fine.
Recovery: +50. Certain areas of the photograph were clipped due to the harsh sunlight. By sliding recovery upwards I can get some of the detail back in those areas (like the glow on the side of the tennis ball).
Fill Light: +20. I wanted to boost some of the shadow areas to make the difference between shadow and highlight less pronounced. Moving recovery and fill light up helps to even out this difference. Careful though… too much of either will make your photograph look either murky or strange.
Blacks: +10. Look at the photograph. There doesn’t seem to be any black, and everything’s gray. Increase the black point to where the darkest of those gray pixels become black.
Contrast: +70. We lost a lot of contrast when evening out the shadows and highlights via the recovery and fill light sliders. Get this contrast back with the contrast slider (or the tone curve section for more control).
Clarity: +30. For photographs with a murkiness due to near-direct sunlight, I’ve found that increasing clarity helps to improve the look of certain areas, like the hairs of the tennis ball.
Vibrance and Saturation: Unchanged. I could have dropped one of them to make the colors more natural, but I liked how it looks a little over-saturated.

Here’s the final condition of these main sliders:

I also did sharpening amount +80 and lens vignetting -50.

Here’s the final result of fiddling with 7 sliders total in ACR (hover over it to compare it to the untouched image):

Using Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom/Aperture) to post-process your JPGs is a really quick and easy way to give them an extra boost.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave a comment!

See you all next Monday, when we post an interview with Otto Kitchens.

Happy shooting!