Friday, 6 January 2017

Should I convert RAW to jpeg before making an HDR?


I've been going back and forth with this. I've been looking more into working with some HDR to just get a feel for the process. I have a 500D and I'm using exposure bracketing to take 3 shots. 0, -2, and +2 EV. I've been using the HDR tool in Photoshop and wonder if just putting 3 RAW files in is giving me the best results.


I've considered trying to expand my files by going from -3 to +3 by using the RAW files to fill in the gaps and converting them to jpegs.


To summarize, is it better to work with RAW or jpegs when making HDR's. and if using jpegs is better, should I use the RAW's to get as many different exposures as possible?



Answer




Raw files are definitely the best starting point for doing HDR processing (or almost any other editing). JPEGs should (in general) be used purely as a write-only format -- i.e., you produce a JPEG for viewing, possibly printing, etc., but once you've converted something to JPEG, you'd ideally never do any editing on it again. Instead, you should generally start from the original, do the editing, and produce another JPEG.


Sometimes you may have no choice but to start from a JPEG, but it's definitely not what's really preferable.


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