OK, I know we’re only required to do blog posts on our projects, so I guess I’m doing two posts this week. But I gotta vent.

I just finished the reading for this week, and while I fully appreciated the main point that Python skills can be extremely helpful at automating repetitive processing tasks, I found myself horrified that the digital archivist immediately decided not to retain any of the JPEGs, opting instead for the RAW files.

I sincerely hope that she conferred with the photography department prior to making that decision. And that they confirmed that there would be no difference between the corresponding image sets. Because as a professional photographer for the last 17 years I can tell you that the RAW file is not always the final image. In fact, it seldom is. There is often some retouching that happens in Photoshop after the image has been exported to JPEG or TIFF. It’s not possible to save that information in the .NEF or .DNG. So throwing those files in the trash could potentially mean throwing out the best visual quality version (i.e. no dust, no lens flare, color corrected, nose hairs removed, tie straightened, 20 lbs lighter, etc.) in favor of the best bit depth version that includes none of those improvements. Even if you get someone to retouch the RAW file again it may or may not look like the version that appeared in the original publication your customer is hoping to find.

Additionally, while Adobe Camera RAW has been storing RAW adjustments in sidecar XMP files for a long time, I would be very nervous about assuming that XMP files created in 2005 in CS2 mapped to the same type of adjustments in today’s Creative Cloud. It was a remarkably different tool back then.

Yes, JPEG is a “lossy” format. However, this really only matters if the user intends to go back and reprocess it trying to pull more highlight, shadow, or color detail out of it. If you’re pretty sure your target user group only ever needs to grab-and-go then a high quality, high resolution JPEG is usually more than enough.

Yes, TIFF would technically be a higher quality format for saving final retouched images. But here’s the thing… the size of TIFFs became unworkable for event photographers once camera resolutions rose above about 6 Megapixels. For example, I use a 24 Megapixel camera at work (this is the average today), and a single TIFF produced by it is in excess of 200 Mb. One image. We shoot hundreds, sometimes thousands of images from a single event. My workflow would grind to a near halt if I had to wait for Lightroom to process that much extra data, or for Photoshop to open a batch. By comparison, JPEG is around 12 Mb for the same image, it snaps open in both Lightroom and Photoshop, and as long as the designer doesn’t want to twist the colors or exposure drastically, no one can visually tell the difference… even when blown up to larger than life size.

All this is to say that when you encounter them: 1) Don’t assume the JPEG folder has identical content to the RAW folder. Inquire about the workflow habits of the creator before you make any decisions… and 2) don’t assume that JPEGs are worthless just because they’re JPEGs. Examine the quality before dismissing them, but also ask yourself how likely your target user group is to need to pull additional detail out of shadows and highlights, and how likely they are to actually make high quality prints that require maximum color depth. Some may need that. Many will not.

/rant