[bigshot]

Rather than concentrating on semantics, you should focus on the core of the rebuttal to your pseudo-argument.  Photojournalists and all other photographers who need to submit their shots immediately shoot JPEG out of necessity, not because JPEG is good enough.  It ain't.

Do you know what the acronym JPEG stands for? It tells you who created the file format. Look it up.

The only people who think jpeg isn't good enough are the armchair photo nerds who own the most expensive equipment, yet only shoot hundreds of test charts and blurry pictures of their dog running around the living room. It's the photo equivalent of the hifi nut with thousand dollar headphones and 24 bit files of crappy AC/DC and Red Hot Chili Peppers albums to play on it.

 

[Mauricio]

Please, someone take this clown out of his misery and explain to him the advantages of RAW.

 

[bigshot]

​

I don't care a bit what you say, but Ad Hominem name calling isn't going to help your case.

Do I know about RAW? I know of at least ten different types of RAW file formats, which are proprietary to the various camera companies... Hasselblad has one, Leica has one, Nikon, Canon, etc... How many of those will still be openable in 20 years when half those companies go out of business and the other half have a new flavor of proprietary file type? Wanna bet that JPEG is still a viable file format for the foreseeable future?

You are very fortunate that ALAC finally went open source in the beginning of this year. Before that, it would be a bad horse to bet on too.

 

[bigshot]

I'm suspecting you won't look up the acronym for jpeg, so I'll help. It stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. That's a consortium of professional photographers who got together to create a standard, compact file format with professional image quality.

AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding. It is part of MPEG-4, which is a high quality sound and video format used by professionals as well. The advantage of AAC audio over the earlier standard, MP3, is that AAC begins to become completely transparent at 192. MP3 just barely gets there at 320 LAME.

The future is not going to look like a hard drive full of klunky, semi-compatible lossless file formats. It's going to be streaming, compressed audio that sounds exactly the same as lossless. We're there now.

 

[wberghofer]

Quote:

The only people who think jpeg isn't good enough are the armchair photo nerds […]

 
Plus the photography and prepress professionals who don’t confuse “good quality” with “good enough”. You see, my learned profession is photographer; I have been earning my money with photography, graphic design, typography and prepress production work since 1972. JPEG file format only is used in the last step of preparing a publication, as soon as the final image dimensions, the quality of the printing paper and the required image output resolution are known.
 
There’s a well-known formula used to calculate the required image output resolution:
 
LPI (lines per inch) × quality factor (should be between 1.5 and 2) =
DPI (dots per inch) required to print the image at 100 percent (final print size)
 
The original image, usually stored in RAW or Photoshop native format, is resized/resampled according to the parameters given in the formula above, saved once as JPEG and placed in the publication. Depening on the quality factor (see the formula) there’s a certain scope within this JPEG may be enlarged, in case this should be required. By enlarging a pixel based digital image, the image resolution is decreased, causing the image to appear fuzzy and pixelated, since the required relation of two pixels for each single halftone screen dot isn’t kept intact. Also the JPEG artifacts, existing in any JPEG image, become clearly visible in the enlarged version of the image. (What I stated is not valid for vector based images, but that’s not what is being discussed here.)
 
That’s the reason why photographers and prepress professionals always keep the original image in an uncompressed file format and export as JPEG according to the requirements of the output device used within the work-flow of a publication’s production.
 
The “good enough" attitude you seem to personify is widespread in the print, audio and video production business and responsible for the steady demise in media production, which can be well observed at least through the last twenty years. Suddenly, everybody who is able to operate layout software, image editing, audio recording and video production software considers himself an expert in this area. The horrific results of this overestimation can be seen and heard daily.
 
Werner.

 

[wberghofer]

Quote:

Hasselblad has one, Leica has one, Nikon, Canon, etc... How many of those will still be openable in 20 years when half those companies go out of business and the other half have a new flavor of proprietary file type?

 
And exactly this is the reason why the DNG (= digital negative) file format has been introduced some years ago by a group of camera and photographic equipment manufacturers.
 
By the way: Not that long ago Adobe celebrated Photoshop’s 20th birthday. The most recent version of Photoshop still is able to open native Photoshop files saved by Photoshop version 1.
 
Werner.

 

[bigshot]

Lossless files are only necessary if you are editing the file... Doing color correction, photo reyouching, sound mixing, radical equalizing... You don't need lossless to look at a finished photograph or listen to music that has already been released to CD.

We are listening to music that has been recorded, mixed and mastered for us already. We're playing back at normal listening volumes, with relatively minor tone corrections. Lossless is overkill.

AAC at a bitrate that achieves transparency is just as serviceable for music listening as lossless. In fact, it's more serviceable because it's compact enough to be streamable, you can email it, you can pack a ton of music on your telephone, the same file format will play on just about any computer or mobile device... All with one file.

 

[Mauricio]

No amount of backtracking, rationalizations and personal projection of your needs and habits onto others will now recover your lost credibility.

 

[wberghofer]

Quote:

That isn't the way to get great sound.

 
The most simple and elegant solution to get great sound is to produce an exact, unaltered, uncompressed copy of an audio file’s binary data and use this for playback.
 
Werner.

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

Please, someone take this clown out of his misery and explain to him the advantages of RAW.

 
Quote:

No amount of backtracking, rationalizations and personal projection of your needs and habits onto others will now recover your lost credibility.

 
Let me be VERY clear to everyone: This kind of personal attack is not appropriate on Head-Fi.

 

[wberghofer]

Quote:

Lossless files are only necessary if you are editing the file […]

 
You obviously are not aware that any serious photographer needs to adjust output contrast and color curves according to the properties of the material or paper the photo will be printed on. Typical newsprint paper is not very dense, and has relatively high dot gain or color bleeding, so newsprint is usually around 85 LPI. Higher-quality paper, such as that used in commercial magazines, has less dot gain, and can range up to 300 LPI with quality glossy (coated) paper.
 
Adjusting output contrast and color curves usually is part of a process known as “editing”. An image destined for newsprint will not look good and satisfying when reproduced in unaltered way on high quality, glossy paper.
 
Opening compressed JPEG files, editing them and saving them again in compressed JPEG format causes a certain loss of image quality.
 
Werner.

 

[bigshot]

How do you play back audio without altering it? The second it turns from an electronic signal to physical sound waves, it undergoes massive alteration. The difference between AAC and FLAC is a drop in the bucket compared to the difference between the sound contained on a CD and the sound that comes out of your speakers. The thing that matters is the sound that reaches your ears. There are much more important problems in getting great sound than lossless vs audibly transparent lossy files. Inaudible is inaudible.

 

[bigshot]

We aren't professional sound engineers or fashion photographers. We're regular people who look at photos we print out on our computers and listen to music on our living room stereos. We don't need hard hats and eye protection. JPEG and AAC work great for us.

 

[bigshot]

It's OK Currawong. That sort of thing doesn't bother me, and I'm not going to get down on that level myself. He can say whatever he wants. I'm not going to answer the ad hominems.

 

[slytown]

Even on a portable system you probably won't tell the difference, possibly on a hi-end desktop system. Just because there are measurable differences in bits/compression doesn't mean there is a listened difference. The best idea would be to archive in lossless and go ahead and convert to much smaller 256 AAC (or VBR) for portable; Some don't carry a lot of portable records so ALAC is fine.