There’s a very good article on the Digital Photography School blog about whether to shoot in RAW, JPEG or both. While it contains useful information it is generic and there are other considerations to bear in mind when using RAW with the Finepix S5600. This post details my experiences.
First you should know that it’s not possible to shoot RAW + JPEG with the S5600, you have to choose one or the other. The main advantage I have found with shooting RAW is that it is much easier to adjust the white balance on the computer that with a JPEG. This means I can leave the camera white balance on auto and adjust this when I get home. Why not change the white balance at shoot time you may ask? On the S5600 you have to dive into the menu system to make the change and in my opinion it’s just to fiddly.
I have also found the S5600 can tend to blow out the highlights if you are not careful. This may be my poor use rather than the camera but it happens. Shooting in RAW I find that I can save more of the highlight detail in the Adobe Camera Raw processing than the in camera JPEG conversion does.
If that was all there was to it I would use RAW all the time, but it’s not and therefore I don’t! The problem is that the camera is very slow when saving RAW files to the XD card. It can be 5 seconds before the camera is ready to shoot again and at times this is just to slow. It’s fine when composing landscapes, detailed shots, and even portraits with adults, but other times it means you miss shots. For example I was shooting pictures of my daughter playing in the garden and wanted to capture her changing expressions. By using JPEG mode I was able to fire off shots much quicker and therefore not miss that one shot I was after. The same is true of sports actions or moving wildlife, shooting in RAW means you probably only get one chance of the shot. You should also know that the continuous shoot options on the S5600 only work in JPEG mode.
So in conclusion my preference is to use RAW as it gives me more control in post processing but I switch to JPEG when I need to fire off shots in quick succession.
greetings, your blog is quite interesting. i just started my new blog called photosaroundtheworld.wordpress.com and i’m wondering if we can exchange links in the blogroll? what do you think? see ya. joao leitao
FinePix S5600. Authoritative camera. Impressive potential and good specifcations, but the layer designated to expose all the capabilities of the camera – the firmware – is, unfortunately, mediocre. Sometimes you try to understand why some function is implemented so inconveniently… But there is no answer… A sensible answer.
Constantly experiencing significant inconvenience we have decided to appeal to FujiFilm corporation with a request to release a firmware upgrade for this camera. We do not ask to change or add anything that requires a serious hardware modification. We only ask to give us a chance to reveal the full potential of the product through a more convenient and powerful agent between the camera and its user — the firmware. The camera deserves it. It is highly capable. Help us.
http://s5600.new-firmware.info/
Interesting thoughts. I’m a Canon 350D user, and I have to say my views on RAW are fairly similar – i.e. that I shoot RAW by habit, and switch to JPEG when I want to get a few quick shots, save some space, or I’m not too worried about needing to modify the final image.
Have you tried Adobe Lightroom yet? I wrote a small review over on my blog. Would be interested to know what you think of it, considering it handles both RAW and JPEG in the same way.
Andy – I have tried the beta 3 version of Adobe Lightroom and posted my initial impressions here. I gave up pretty quickly as it was so damned slow on my laptop but I’ll be giving the beta 4 version a try as that’s due out very soon.
The fact that it can handle JPEG in the same way as RAW is the feature that most interests me. Being able to set the white balance in the same wy I can with RAW is great news and when I tried this it seemed to work fine.
They’ve got a long way to go though before the DAM part of Lightroom is anywhere near as good as in Photoshop Elements 4 (or IMatch) and at the moment there is no migration option
Have you come across a little freeware app called “S7raw”? It processes fujifilm raw images like a dream – though it’s still beta.
Yes I have used s7raw and as I posted here – http://luckhurst.wordpress.com/2006/10/04/finepix-s5600-raw-converters-for-fuji-raf-format/ – if I hadn’t already got Adobe Elements I would have used it for processing my RAF files.