RAW, JPEG,camera rendering and profiles

I am an amateur photographer and extensively use many Adobe products including Lightroom 2.4 and Photoshop CS4.  Several years ago I made a decision to shoot all my pictures in Raw and use Lightroom to convert to JPEG’s.  I started converting them all to DNG’s at one point but finally didn’t see much benefit to that.  I appreciate the flexibility and adjustability available with a RAW file format.   Up until now I thought that was a good decision.  Recently after reading many articles I decided to change to Adobe RGB instead of my Canon 30D’s default format of sRGB.  I also changed to recording all images in both Raw and JPEG format at least temporarily to see how it might affect my workflow.  I imported both files into Lightroom and was very surprised to see the difference between the RAW image and JPEG image.  The raw image was in my opinion dull and unappealing.  The JPEG image was vibrant, brighter and definitely more appealing to my eye.  Curious, I got online and started reading all the articles, tech notes and Blogs about the difference between RAW and JPEG and to quote one article “Lightroom will not match your cameras rendering when working with raw files as it’s just raw data, but you can use the new profiles to emulate the manufacturer’s look for some cameras, or you can build your own profile to match.”  I tried several experiments on my Canon going back to sRGB to see it didn’t make any difference.  I tried all the standard Lightroom camera profiles and none of them matched the JPEG image.  After working for about 15 minutes I was finally able to get the raw image to closely match the JPEG image but it has me thinking.  Do I really want to spend the time on ALL my raw images to match the JPEG image?  I understand I can create custom profiles but from want I read every image will be different based on the white balance, color tones etc.  What really puzzled me is that when I compare my raw and JPEG images using other image viewers the images are identical???  This includes a Canon application (I can understand that) but also a third party application such as FastStone Image Viewer which will read Canon Raw files.  The images are identical.  This should not be this difficult!   How can FastStone interpret Canon raw files better that Adobe?  Is it really true that the camera rendering is not imbedded in Canon’s own raw file format?  I really don’t what to have to record all images in raw and JPEG and have to deal and store duplicate files for the rare time the raw format gives me better adjustability that JPEG.  I appreciate any and all thoughts on this subject.

RAW, JPEG,camera rendering and profiles

cpgilles,

if you use default settings in Lightroom (i.e brightness 50, contrast 25, etc.) and in your camera (no added saturation and such), your jpegs should be a very close match to the RAWs developed in Lightroom. Any differences should be trivial and only visible to the critical eye. Certainly not amounting to ''less vibrant''. Something must be wrong here. Check whether all your settings (except the profile) are default. Better yet, post some screenshots showing the differences and the develop settings you used.

What really puzzled me is that when I compare my raw and JPEG images using other image viewers the images are identical???

RAW, JPEG,camera rendering and profiles

Firstly, paragraphs really help make long text readable. I'm sure there are quite a number of internet ADD folk that look at your post and said 'Forget about it'. This is not a personal comment BTW, merely a comment on readability.

Programs like Faststone extract the internal JPEG from within the Raw file. This will essentially be a smaller version JPEG that has all the camera settings, as if it were shot as a JPEG. So all sharpening, saturation, contrast settings, etc will be applied to it. The viewer doesn't do any processing on it.

In a colour managed application, you won't see the difference between sRGB and Adobe RGB really, because they are being managed. Look at them in something that's not managed and there's a good chance the Adobe RGB file will look a little flat and desaturated.

If you shoot a particular type of photography, set up a preset/camera profile and make it the default settings in Import or via 'Set Default' in Develop (hold down Alt/Option to make it appear).

Edit: Snap.. Jao gets in there 1st.. Too long typing here

RAW files have no colour profile in them. It makes no difference to a RAW file how you set your cameras colour space. The colour space you set in camera is embedded into the jpg that is created by the camera processing the RAW file. It may also be passed via meta data to the proprietary software from your camera manufacturer, but this is not used by LR which uses it's own large colour space (a version of ProPhoto called ''Mellisa''.

You may find this link informative about the often misunderstood issue of colour management.

Thanks for everyone's quick response and I will remember to use smaller paragraphs.

Some forums remove all spaces and I guess I got use to that.

I did learn a few things.  I will try some more experimenting and let you know what I find out.

Again thanks for your help on this.  I want to understand it.

I took two new pictures.  The camera was set to record both RAW and JPEG maximum quality.  House with reddish bricks, flowers in front, green grass and trees and blue skies with clouds.  Pretty standard stuff.  On the first set the camera was set on standard picture style.  The second was set on faithful.  I reset many of the Lightroom defaults.  The ones that I though mattered.

There is still differences easily distinguishable between the raw files and JPEG files.  Take a look at the 4 histograms:

Raw file standard style.

JPEG Standard style:

Raw Faithful style:

JPEG Faithful style:

Any thoughts?

I'm not sure the exercise has a valid empirical answer.

The Raw file has no profile as yet, so we are viewing the histogram through Lightroom's internal working space. The colour balance points on the histograms looks similar, while there are differences in contrast, saturation and overall global exposure level.

Have you looked into the available Camera Profiles in Camera Calibration? These do reasonably emulate camera settings. BTW Faithful isn't really faithful. Neutral or Standard are closer to 'actual', even though artistically they lack pop.

You cannot really tell much from these. They look quite similar to me, except from the highlight areas and the deep shadows. In the extreme highlights, the camera profiles in Lightroom do not give you perfect correspondence with the in-camera jpeg so that is normal and should normally not really be that visible. Considering the shadows, it looks like you might have the blacks value not at the default of 5. The Lightroom RAW rendering looks like it is clipping too much. You should make a screenshot of the Develop settings. It also would be good to post a comparison between Lightroom RAW and camera jpeg rendering.

P.S. considering the histogram in Lightroom. The histogram that you see here is in a colorspace that has prophotoRGB primaries and a sRGB tone curve. Also the histogram from the jpegs will get calculated into this space. You sometimes will see that the camera will clip, while Lightroom can still render colors.