I would go so far as to say: if you're using in-camera JPEGs, you would probably be better off with a cellphone.

▲ shakow 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's a very contemptuous thing to say.

Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.

I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.

▲ barnabee 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Totally agree!

Photography for me is about the physical and optical side of things. Choosing a lens for a situation, framing the shot, aperture, shutter, etc.

When I switched to digital I was seduced by post-processing, partly as a substitute for the look I could achieve with different films, but mostly I suspect because all those sliders and numbers and graphs are naturally attractive to a certain type of person :)

I eventually pretty much stopped taking photos.

Changing my workflow from post processing RAW photos (and barely ever looking at them again) to using in-camera JPEGs that I can immediately share, print, or whatever was enough to start me taking photos again regularly as a hobby.

More unexpectedly, in addition to the obvious time saving of removing the post processing step (aside from occasional cropping), the satisfaction benefit of the immediacy with which I can now print, share, display, etc. my favourite photos has been huge. It’s so much more rewarding getting photos right after you took them and actually doing something with them!

Now I’m not even sure I’d call all that digital image processing “photography”. Sure, it’s an art in its own right, and one some photographers enjoy, but the essence of photography lies somewhere else. I’d encourage everyone to try a camera with decent in camera JPEG production. You can always shoot Raw+JPEG if you’re scared to go full cold turkey.

▲ Ancapistani 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> That's a very contemptuous thing to say.

I really don't think it is.

When I pick up a camera, my intent is one of two things: the experience of photography itself, or the best quality I can reasonably obtain. Neither of those goals are attained with a smartphone.

Every other time I take a photo, it's with a smartphone. It's easily good enough for the vast majority of use cases.

> Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable,

That's... absurd. Granted I lean toward a more "street photography" style, but it's exceptionally rare that I spend more then ~30s on a photo in Lightroom. Most of that time is spent cropping. White balance, exposure correction, etc. are all done in bulk.

> they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.

Sure - and why wouldn't you want to play with RAW as well? It's not like the profile the camera would have used isn't embedded in the RAW anyhow.

> I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.

I don't disagree with this at all. Of course there are edge cases; that's why I said "probably".

To put it another way: if you're shooting JPEGs regularly, you're almost certainly not doing it for the craft. There are very few reasons I can think of to choose a traditional camera if you're not going to take advantage of the improvements in ISO and dynamic range that it offers - and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG.

0: You give up ISO in that you are discarding much of the information that you could use to push/pull process, which is very often preferable to very high ISO.

ETA: I just looked it up. In 2024, I kept 767 photos from my iPhone and 1,900 from my cameras. That includes multiple performances of my wife's dance studio, so the latter is heavily skewed by that. Excluding those, I kept 376. In other words, I appear to be taking my own advice here.

▲ ubercow13 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

>and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG

No you don't? Good in camera JPEGs will utilise push-pull processing, exposing for maximal dynamic range all for you. You don't lose the advantages of the better optics and sensor just because the JPEG is produced in camera.

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Ancapistani 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

How would the camera know if you're exposing two stops below your intended EV because you plan to push it in post or if that _is_ your intended EV?

Furthermore, JPEG supports ~8 stops of dynamic range while my X-Pro3's raw files support ~14 stops. You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG (with that camera).

	▲	ubercow13 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Because some will choose the exposure and decide when to underexpose and push for you, eg fuji DR feature. You choose your intended EV for the image and it chooses whether to underexpose and push based on the dynamic range of the scene. >You lose almost half your total DR when you shoot JPEG No because the camera is applying a tone curve that compresses that DR when producing the JPEG. You lose precision, not DR, but if you don't intend to process the image further it doesn't matter much.

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justincormack 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That should be configurable - my camera has 3 dynamic range settings, and I almost always use the narrowest one.

▲ shakow 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All that you said is perfectly valid for your usecase. But you can't just make your use case a generality.

Some people have a camera because they want to take better pictures than their smartphone but don't want to bother with post-processing, some have tried manual processing and found that the work/result balance was not doing it for them, some think that JPEGs look perfectly fine, some just don't have the time to do the processing... there are myriads of reason for which people would like to land somewhere between “let iOS do it” and “I systematically chose my ISO according to this Darktable script I developed these last years”.

▲ dotancohen 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

  > the best quality I can reasonably obtain.

Cellphones absolutely can produce high quality results. Especially if you add the constraint "best quality I can reasonably obtain" as many consider carrying a dedicated camera all the time to not be reasonable. And this was the case even before the advent of the smartphone. How many people did you see carrying a camera in 1980, or 1990, or 2000? Almost zero.

The best camera, is the camera you have on you.

▲ 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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▲ necovek 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a pretty generic statement, considering how variable are "in-camera JPEGs" depending on camera and generation.

But even so, most are tuned to natural colours, and there is no beating low depth of field for bokeh/subject separation.