JPG versus RAW

I wanted to take a photo for the Flickr D40/60 Challenge group I belong to. The challenge topic was Silohettes', seeing nothing of interest around the home place I decided to run up the road to my grandmothers farm. It was a very overcast day which should make silhouetting very easy but I kind of wanted some blue sky.

I walked into the old tobacco barn thinking it might make a neat silhouette shot from the inside. After taking a few shots and looking at the results in camera I decided that they just didn't look good. It hit me that this would be a good opportunity to get some shots to do some new RAW versus JPG comparisons.

I used to used to shoot RAW a lot since reading about so many saying how much better RAW is. I got tired of spending so much time messing with RAW data and finding my printed RAW photos look no better than JPGs. The software developer in me started to say why do I not see any difference in prints.

I started looking passed everyone saying 'RAW is great' and 'all of the pros use i' wondering just why I don't see any difference. Everyone is saying that RAW has so much more data, 12 bit versus 8 and that you can fix badly exposed shots. After googling around for quite a while and reading a lot of technical articles I concluded that RAW does nothing for you and it is probably mostly driven by marketing and peoples lack of knowledge. I went back to shooting JPG and have never looked back.

In a nutshell I discovered that 8 bits can represent more shades of each color than we can actually see, all printers that I may ever have my work printed on are 8 bit, Nikons RAW data format is proprietary meaning that everyone but Nikon has to guess at how to decode it, the RAW data format changes with each camera version and 20 years from now we may even have no way to view the data, all RAW files need processing (basically converted to JPG) to see or print, operating systems need third party software just to view.

Anyway, below is my post processed out of camera JPG from my D40 with all in camera processing functions set to manual and a RAW. Above is the out of camera JPG with no post processing down sized by Irfanview. Camera was in manual exposure set the same for both shots and it's obvious I didn't use a tripod.

I didn't spend more than 30 minutes or so on both shots, I used CS3 camera RAW on both. Which is the JPG and which is the RAW?