Much is made of the RAW vs JPEG debate. I think the results are very much down to what parameters are used in the raw convertor and the co-efficients used for the jpeg encoder. These you may or may not have control over in your software or camera.
A simple test. The eye of a small rusty sewing needle was photographed with the 20D set to produce RAW and Fine Jpeg from the same shot. No fancy lighting just the builtin flash. I used Canon EOSviewer to convert the RAW to an 8 bit tiff. It has no setting you can play with really. I also tried PS CS to convert but no real difference.
A 100% 300 x 400 crop was taken from jpeg and raw versions and put side by side in a new image. No sharpening was applied to either.
So the question is which of the 2 needles is the RAW, left or right ?
Just to prove there is a small difference the second image is the 2 merged together in exclusive mode.
In the case of Don's Nikon test is it that the fine jpeg is poor or the raw convertor sharpens ?
Last edited by robski; 26-07-11 at 22:35.
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