Jpg conversions just like RAW - Lightroom Aperture

I don't use a mac but I think Aperture does it also but Adobe Lightroom allows you to take a jpg image and do all the same conversions that you can do in raw - all of them. Anyone noticed a quality difference in printing or image degradation?

I don't use a mac but I think Aperture does it also but Adobe Lightroom allows you to take a jpg image and do all the same conversions that you can do in raw - all of them. Anyone noticed a quality difference in printing or image degradation?

Haven't tried it - but I guess it would be helpful if you only had a jpeg for whatever reason. If you only had a jpeg, I would think it would be great to be able to fix things like vignetting, CA etc simply. I expect white balance and other colour/tonal changes could only be as good as through photoshop at best, but maybe the interface makes it easier and quicker?

If by the question you mean you are after a comparison with raw conversion, I would suggest that the quality can't match a RAW convertion because:

1. Raw is captured in 12 bit colour (then converted to 16 bit for editing), jpegs are 8 bit only, so you won't have as much info to work with - colours will go out of gamut quicker etc.

2. The jpeg has already had a curve put on it by the camera and some data has been lost in that process already.

It depends on what you are after quality-wise. You see all sorts of files being passed of as "good".

(Rats - lost another post to the evil web gods...*sigh*. Here it goes again...)

Hello,

I thought I would take a shot at this by creating an example and seeing what actually happens. I have been using Lightroom quite a bit and was interested in the results myself.

I took a very underexposed RAW image and exported it as JPG and then re-imported it into Lightroom. I then cranked the exposure setting 3.5 stops (overexpose a bunch) to see what the color and histogram responses would look like. The JPG did much better than I would have expected, but still could not hold a candle to the RAW. Here are the results. Check out the histogram and see how the entire left side of the JPG is gone, while the RAW retains quite a bit more information. Also look at the white nasty sky of the JPG vs the blue sky in the RAW.

Orig:

Raw:

JPG:

Hope this helps!

1 more...here is the similar test, except with temperature, this time starting with the image exposed corrected to a more accurate value. Then I crank down the temp all the way and compare. Again, check out the histogram and the water color. No reason to use JPG unless you really have no choice, although it is nice that Lightroom allows such uniform workflow.

Orig:

RAW:

JPG:

Cheers!