what resulution should I be shooting

[KingDome]

Using a canon t1i with a 70- 200L 2.8 for High School Sports.  What resulution is best?

[Skirball · Accepted solution]

You should be shooting full raw.  If you insist on shooting jpg then use the large setting.  SD cards and hard drives are cheap, there's no reason on shooting smaller resolutions unless you're some sort of photojournalist in Afganistan that needs to upload shots through your phone via 56k modem.

All you do is limit your ability to post process.  Even if you don't want to mess with RAW right now, just use a program like lightroom to autoconvert RAW to jpg upon upload.  You never know down the road if you'll want to try fixing up an old photo.  Most of us that have been shooting for awhile could tell you about some set of photos from some trip somewhere that were shot in jpg and we'd give anything to have them in RAW.

[jrhoffman75 · Accepted solution]

Skirball is right on. Set your camera to RAW + Large JPEG and you get best of both worlds. RAW for future use when you gain more skill/comfort in post processing and JPEG now without any work on your part.

[Skirball · Accepted solution]

You should be shooting full raw.  If you insist on shooting jpg then use the large setting.  SD cards and hard drives are cheap, there's no reason on shooting smaller resolutions unless you're some sort of photojournalist in Afganistan that needs to upload shots through your phone via 56k modem.

All you do is limit your ability to post process.  Even if you don't want to mess with RAW right now, just use a program like lightroom to autoconvert RAW to jpg upon upload.  You never know down the road if you'll want to try fixing up an old photo.  Most of us that have been shooting for awhile could tell you about some set of photos from some trip somewhere that were shot in jpg and we'd give anything to have them in RAW.

[jrhoffman75 · Accepted solution]

Skirball is right on. Set your camera to RAW + Large JPEG and you get best of both worlds. RAW for future use when you gain more skill/comfort in post processing and JPEG now without any work on your part.

[amfoto1 · Accepted solution]

Yeah, memory cards are cheap. Get a handful and shoot the max quality. You can always reduce image size and resolution down from a big image file, without any loss of quality.... it's much harder to increase image size and resolution and maintain good quality.

It's up to you whether to shoot JPEGs or RAW.

JPEGs you'd better get right at the time you push the shutter button. There's a lot less flexibility to adjust them later in post-processing.

I shoot RAWs almost exclusively, using Lightroom to handle cataloging, light editing, RAW conversions and batch processing of proof files.... Photoshop for finished images for printing or other high quality use.

***********
Alan Myers

San Jose, Calif., USA
"Walk softly and carry a big lens."
GEAR: 5DII, 7D(x2), 50D(x3), some other cameras, various lenses & accessories
FLICKR & PRINTROOM 

[KingDome]

Thanks guys. Yall are always a big help.

Since I am a casual contributor, I will start a new post, SO BE WATCHING.  Instead of posting it here.

[TCampbell]

One little thing to note... and this really is a personal choice for you to consider.

RAW images are preferred by many (possibly most) serious photographers because the images preserve original data and in so doing, they allow for the greatest amount of adjustment latitude when you want to process the images on the computer.  

In contrast, JPEG images greatly reduce file sizes by doing some in-camera processing.  Color corrections, sharpening, de-noising, etc. may all be applied to improve the image and these would not be applied when you shoot RAW.  This is not a big deal since just about every RAW workflow application on a computer easily handles all of that for you.  HOWEVER... the JPEG compression algorithm is designed to "flatten" areas of an image to reduce file sizes by eliminating subtle differences between pixels when the algorithm believes your human eye would not be able to detect the difference.  As long as the image doesn't need much adjustment, it turns out that that's true (it probably makes little difference.)  BUT... if you do need to adjust the image more than a tiny amount, those subtle differences can be very important.  Recovery of details (especially in highight areas or shadow areas) can be lost if the JPEG algorithm tosses out those subtle differences in favor of reducing the file size.

All of this sounds like a good case for why you should only ever shoot RAW.  But it's not quite so cut-n-dry.

It turns out that since RAW files are significantly larger, each image takes more space in your in-camera memory buffer and takes longer to transfer to your SD card.  This means if you put your camera into continuous burst mode and just press-and-hold the shutter button down and count the number of frames your camera can quickly shoot before the shutter speed slows to a crawl (it will do this when the internal buffer is full and it has to wait for an image to transfer to the card before it can shoot another image) and do the same in JPEG mode (where images are smaller), you'll discover you can shoot quite a few MORE images in continuous burst mode if you shoot JPEGs rather than RAW.

In other words... you're following the action in the game, you see something photo-worthy that you want to capture, your camera is in continuous burst mode, and you press and hold the shutter button...

If you shoot JPEG, you hear:   click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click...... click........ click.......click

But if you shoot RAW, you hear:    click, click, click......................click....................click.....................click

The above is just an example to illustrate the point.  On your T1i, the tables I'm reading show that you should get about 9 RAWs before the buffer is full and the shooting rate drops to a crawl and your camera should be able to shoot somewhere around 170 JPEGs before that happens in JPEG mode.  BTW... this assumes that you use a fast memory card.  Performance may not be as good if your memory cards are slow.

Once the buffer is full and the shooting speed slows to a crawl, you realize you may be missing a lot of action beteween shots.

[KingDome]

Wow a lot to consider.  I have shot in raw and large jpeg and have noticed just what you are talking about.  I'm getting to realize my limitations until I can afford a D5 or something.  But I have not really noticed picture quality being any different.   And maybe because I shot in manual and conditions change from picture to picture. like shading, time of day, the son dropping.

If I give the customer large jpeg will they be able to enlarge to 8x10 or even poster size with out losing quality?

DAVY

[TCampbell]

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@KingDome wrote:

Wow a lot to consider.  I have shot in raw and large jpeg and have noticed just what you are talking about.  I'm getting to realize my limitations until I can afford a D5 or something.  But I have not really noticed picture quality being any different.   And maybe because I shot in manual and conditions change from picture to picture. like shading, time of day, the son dropping.

If I give the customer large jpeg will they be able to enlarge to 8x10 or even poster size with out losing quality?

DAVY

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RAW at  ISO 100 will probably look pretty good right out of the camera.  But dial up to, say, ISO 800 and you'll notice the RAW looks fairly "noisy" when you zoom in and view the image at 100% pixel size on your screen (1 camera pixel = 1 screen pixel) whereas the JPEG will have been smoothed out quite a bit by in-camera processing.  You can apply that same processing to the RAW as well... it's just that the camera is told not to mess with your data when you shoot RAW so it will not attempt to smooth out the noise (but the computer can do that.)

One side-effect of smoothing out the noise is that it also softens the overall image.  There is a delicate balance between sharpening (which increases noise) and de-noising (which softens the image.)  But consider that noise is noticeable in HUGE image sizes when the viewer can see every pixel.  In smaller images (e.g. most images posted to the web for example) the image is downsampled to a lower resolution and that naturally eliminates a LOT of noise.    Before you de-noise an image you want to preview it at the size you intend to use when displaying it to others and see how much noise is naturally eliminated just because you resized it.  You also want to apply white balance correction, exposure adjustment, and any shadows/highlights, curves, or levels adjustment before you go after noise because the amount of noise visible in the image will change as you change all of those other settings.   Basically when you're done with all those other types of exposure adjustments, you can see how much noise is actually left and now you're only dealing with the stuff that actually needs to be dealt with...rather than unnecessarily over applying noise-reduction (and softening the image more than it needed to be softened.)