Fujifilm RAW vs JPEG

There are many discussions online about the quality of the Jpeg images that can produced straight out of the Fujifilm cameras, so I thought I would show some of my recent photos that I have 'published' on social media and in my portfolio ( which you can find here: www.flickr.com/ajecaldwell ) so you can compare the processed files to the straight out of camera jpegs..  

Obviously the jpegs often look different to the processed RAW files based on the choices I make during processing, and often I am shooting a little bit on the dark side to make sure I retain detail in the highlights of the photos,  but most of these jpeg I would happily show as my work with some minor tweaks to the brightness levels.

And if anyone ever wants to see the jpeg image for one of my photos, I am more than happy to show them; just ask!

In fact I would say that if you are looking for a camera that takes 'nice photos' and you don't want to go down the 'rabbit hole' of post processing then the Fujifilm cameras are probably one of the best options around at the moment.

There are quite a few Fujifilm camera users who only shoot jpeg images and do not bother with shooting RAW photos, such is how good they see the straight out of camera images.  This will be sacrilege to many other photographers in the modern digital world, but I say each to their own.

I generally will use the camera produced images if I need to get something out quickly to a client or to post, but I always shoot RAW files as well in case I need to do more extensive editing.  In fact I was helping to shoot some images for the Napier Music Academy on the weekend and I was able to drop the jpegs straight from the camera into a folder and share them for them to use straight away.  There is no way I would have done this from one of my previous cameras as the jpegs would not have been anywhere near good enough.

In the image pairs below the first is the processed RAW image, and the second is the jpeg straight from the camera.