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Everything you said is supported by regular image formats. You can adjust white balance of any photo and you think image formats are only limited to 16-bit and sRGB?

That’s not why we use RAW. It’s partly because (1) if you used Adobe RGB or Rec. 709 on a JPEG, a lot of people would screw it up, (2) you get a little extra raw data from the pre-filtering of Bayer, X-Trans, etc. data, (3) it’s less development work for camera manufacturers, and (4) partly historical.

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davidgay 11 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Everything you said is supported by regular image formats. You can adjust white balance of any photo and you think image formats are only limited to 16-bit and sRGB?

No - the non-RAW image formats offered were traditionally JPG and 8-bit TIFF. Neither of those are suitable for good quality post-capture edits, irrespective of their colour space (in fact, too-wide a colour space is likely to make the initial capture worse because of the limited 8-bit-per-colour range).

These days there is HEIF/similar formats, which may be good enough. But support in 3rd party tools (including Adobe) is no better than RAW yet, i.e., you need to go through a conversion step. So...

	▲	zrav 11 days ago \| parent [-]
		Also don't forget one of the promises of RAW: That RAW developers will continue to evolve, so that you'll be able to generate a better conversion down the line than now. Granted, given the maturity of developers the pace of innovation has slowed down a lot compared to 20 years ago, but there are still incremental improvements happening. Another advantage of RAW is non-destructive editing, at least in developers that support it and are more than import plugins for traditional editors. I rarely have to touch Photoshop these days.

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kjkjadksj 11 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Try and adjust shadows and highlights in a jpg vs a raw file and see what happens. There is no data there in the jpg just black and white blown out. Raw file you can brighten the shadows and find moth man standing there with a little extra sensor noise.

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harrall 11 days ago | parent [-]

Are you adjusting an 8-bit JPG (probably) or a 12-bit JPG (rare)?

Try adjusting a 8-bit RAW file and you will have the same problem.

You are conflating format and bitrate.

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stephen_g 11 days ago | parent [-]

Yes and no. Your point about bitrate being important is correct, but you're still largely wrong.

The actual main thing about RAW is that the transforms for white balance, gamma, brightness, colour space, etc. haven't yet been applied and baked into the file. With JPEG, at least some of those transforms have already been applied, which then limits how mucn you can do as opposed to starting with the untransformed sensor data.

You could definitely do much more with a 12-bit JPEG than you could with an 8-bit JPEG, but still not as much as you can do starting from RAW data.

	▲	redeeman 10 days ago \| parent [-]
		the absolute main thing is debayering, and yeah, then colorspace transformations etc

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emkoemko 11 days ago | parent | prev [-]

what format can i a change the white balance of the image on other then RAW in software, for all the years i have used digital cameras i can't think of one...