Raw vs jpeg in night shooting

What da f*** is going on!?! I forgot to switch from jpeg to raw again... and the whole shoot was just in the trash can... And why do I remember about it only at the end of the shoot? I went through a huge number of courtyards and do not want to come back here, but do I really have to?

In fact, I have a lot of experience shooting in jpeg: all reportage shooting is done in this format. Plus I shot in jpeg for a long time until I discovered raw. I am ready to even accept street or graphics, but not night photography.

Pictures taken in raw are easier to process in everything! I spend less time adjusting the parameters I need in the raw converter than with a snapshot taken directly in jpeg.

I need to highlight the shadows slightly, dim the highlights and adjust the white balance. If the first two points can be somehow done using the Camera Raw filter, opening a jpeg image in it, then the white balance is simply physically impossible to adjust! For reference: there is a separate plug-in Adobe Camera Raw, which is designed to work with raw files. And there is a filter with the same interface, into which you can upload a jpeg image.

When the photo is taken immediately in jpeg, than forget about the correct white balance! The only acceptable way to adjust the WB is to remove the parasitic tint using the eyedropper, an adjustment layer, HSB settings, and the Divide blend mode.

All cool photographers shoot in jpeg. But they do it in such a way that all that remains is to frame and set a white point with a black point. I also try to go to this and every day I come across the fact that I do not want to twist the settings. By the way, reporters in some news photo agencies are forbidden to shoot in raw and process any photo, as this distorts reality.

And if I still try to twist something, it only gets worse. Photographic art is not about processing, but about the ability to see, feel and convey with the help of one's own visual language.

But when shooting at night, white balance dominates due to the difference in color temperature of artificial light sources. So it turns out that I can take half of the pictures, where the light turned out more or less, and the second can be safely sent to the basket.

No attempt has been made to correct the color so far. Even a smartphone gives a better result in terms of colors.

Therefore, any night shooting simply must be carried out in raw format!

I had thoughts of trying to shoot in jpeg voluntarily and consciously, but it turned out differently and I'm not very happy with the result.

I spent more time processing the images than if they were raw.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is setting the white balance manually in camera, but what's the point when they came up with raw?

There really is a point: when you need to send a picture from a camera directly to the Internet without processing.

These pictures were taken in the Riverside part of Vologda between Nekrasov and Karl Marx streets.

In this series, we have selected the worst attempts to correct color and white balance.

I haven’t decided yet whether I will reshoot this area or accept what I got...there are good results and they prevail!

At least this shooting made me rethink a lot.

And after that, I started the process of experiments.