Reuters bans RAW

<p>http://petapixel.com/2015/11/18/reuters-issues-a-worldwide-ban-on-raw-photos/</p>

<p>What do we reckon? seams downright ridiculous to me</p>

Seems like a half baked attempt to answer the view that manipulation and deception are taking place. i do not see why the saved format will do anything but that this so called policy change will give an illusion of control by the editors. Is it ridiculous? Sure. )If you boss says he wants all your memos henceforth double spaced , you may think f that it is ridiculous. So what else is new? Chances are you will grit teeth and go " aye aye sir" and get on with the job, and take the payment. Be honest now..)

 

But I would surmise that JPEG handling takes some less time overall and Reuters may have a small argument for such a desire. Not much though.

 

On manipulation and provenance, hah, I doubt that this is going anywhere... If someone wants to fudge they fudge, huh? I am suspecting that in the grand scheme, editors are the ones doing most of the fudging. Selection and cropping and even PPing.

 

Kind of dumbth seeming for those of us who do not run the presses. They too answer to a board of directors or editor in chief who knows even less photo wise...Who responds to clients of Reuters who may know less but are gettig antsy to their own boards of directors.. And heck do not forget all the LAWYERS!.

 

There may be a stronger case based on something we do not ken, ---let us hope but I kinda doubt.

 

So now its RAW plus JPEG and maybe that is the answer all along.

<p>Seems a bit over the top. When I was shooting for a local online paper there was never any PSing the photos to alter what was in the photo, white balance correction when needed, cropping and re-sizing the photo to meet requirements, yes.</p>

<p>As far as the photographers doing the job "as required" to sell their shots to Reuters. Sure they will and if this jpeg requirement is too much for their digital darkroom artistic talents to accept, nobody is forcing them to shoot for Reuters. If Reuters wants to cripple the ability to get the best dynamic range and image quality from a camera, that is their decision. I wonder if the person making the decision understands that to get a camera to come close to the dynamic range of the human eye, some of the things you can do with RAW is needed. Even shooting jpeg, the camera settings used and the lens can be used creatively. A talented photographer will still be able to get good shots.</p>

<p>While I think it is a little much, nothing to get overly excited about. We got by for decades with black and white photos in our news papers. We will survive Reuters photos with less color saturation and dynamic range. It will be interesting to see if we will notice a drastic change in the images we will see from them.</p>

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<p>Blown highlights, anyone?</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>I can understand no Photo Shopping that alters the "truth" but banning getting the picture "right" in LR or similar seams downright counter productive to me, JPEGs aren't immune from tampering. Glad to see no one thinks its a great idea from Reuters.</p>

 

Seems like a perfectly fine thing to me.<br>There is no reason why journalists should deliver minor 'works of PS art'.

<p>Great ! We are all united against distorting the "truth" and artistically interpreting the news and fully behind respecting "Reuther's Trust Principles" of delivering unbiased, reliable and objective news. Surely, banning RAW and CR2 will solve the problem ! </p>

<p>Next thing you know Reuters is going to dictate the photographer's incamera rendering settings because they don't like high contrast over saturated pics with minimal sharpening. And none of that incamera HDR/Nikon D-Lighting crap either.</p>

<p>It seems a good idea to me. If photogs don't like it then they can't contribute. If Reuters want to dictate in camera settings that strikes me as OK too. This is not about art.</p>

It seems in the old days people knew how to set the correct exposure. If you get blown highlights it is not the JPEG fault but your own. Take a course in Camera Exposure 101. Professional photographers like those of National Geographic used slide film. What you got was what you got. They did a good job too, none of this having to use RAW to correct their shots.

 

News phtotographers have long since given up quality for convenience. Large format Speed Graphics gave way too dinky 35mm film because, even though the quality suffered it was more convenient.

<p>Well the slides were of course not manipulated but the transfer from slide to print with acceptable results required extensive manipulation of the data. Of course what Reuters want is that the photographers don't remove or add objects to the scene that were not there, and they want them to focus on capturing what happened rather than making an artist's liberal interpretation of it in post processing and beautifying things to get more impact. With high resolution cameras available today the impact of using JPG is not that severe as each pixel occupies a tiny area in the final printed image, so any artifacts that may be there are likely also of negligible impact. Also the same thing is true with bit depth; 8 bits per colour in each tiny pixel of a 40 MP image gives more bits per pixel when resampled to (say) 5MP for the application. Furthermore time is saved as the photographer is not spending hours perfecting shots to their aesthetic taste in PS, also the transfer of the images is faster and editorial work is quicker as well. It's about informing the public about what happened, not about making art or a digital painting.</p>

Another thing. Is a JPEG image purer, more journalistically purer, someone thinks so?. From what I know of the innards of my camera's silicon soul,- and I know little enough and care little enough- I understand this much, The chip processes the raw array of data to make a compressed product, the printable and mailable JPEG. We have already added spices and flavors by tweaking to taste. Little more contrast, little more red in WB. Digital world has made things flakier than ever. But editors have not changed.

I don't know how things are where you are, but i see a lot of annoying press photos lately. It's not as much that they are less 'journalistically pure', but plain annoying. The trend appears to go towards overly processed images, in which light skies show more dynamic range and overall are darker than the scene below the sky, which itself is a display of how easy it is to overdo stupid things like a "clarity" filter, making you wonder whether you are looking at some almost photorealistic aquarel or an actual photo.<br>Reuters now bans such nonsense. And that's a good thing.

<p>My recent experiences with press media lead me to believe that there is a trend is to avoid paying for as many pictures as possible - my most recent case was a journalist from a local newspaper who kept a good eye out on social media for good looking pictures posted by local businesses or organisations of interesting events or happenings. The journalist would then message the company/org asking for a higher res version, of course they were happy to oblige as it really constituted free advertising for that organisation.</p>

<p>As we take pretty good pictures (RAW processed) and are pretty quick at replying we get quite a lot of free advertising. Which I don't mind at all.</p>

Reuters should just provide cameras with baked-in JPEG settings, so that no two photos taken in the same time & space would differ. Asking only for JPEG file is really not going too far from JPEG file generated from raw file, as far as the concern of manipulation go.

 

When I first read the OP I thought that the requirement was for faster results. Reading the article I saw the manipulation concern tossed in for extra measure. :-/

<p>I shot about 40,000 images for my biggest client this year, I do corporate journalism for them. I just went and checked, 37 were in RAW. I love JPEG, it is like shooting chrome.<br>

Good for Rueters, enough of the BS and a great PJ can make getting a real moment better than most "art". </p>

<p>I've shot at sports events where some of the shooters were uploading during breaks, always JPEGs. You're not going to download all those images in RAW to a computer and then upload through a cellular net.</p>

<p>I cannot see how anyone can associate RAW with art/artistic and Jpegs with some kind of truth/honesty, this kind of polarization simply doesn't make sense to me.</p>

<p>I do not necessarily think they are addressing the view of some that manipulation takes place. They could be addressing the issue of if it is possible. It presents a level playing field for all and also the issue of whether a photo is better because of the format. Manipulation is still possible but holding everyone the the same standard might eliminate some arguments and challenges. If jpeg can be handled quicker maybe someone would have to explain delays in delivering their work. To me it probably doesn't mean much except that it is more standardized and level field.<br>

Is there a difference in cost to publish these formats?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>It seems in the old days people knew how to set the correct exposure. If you get blown highlights it is not the JPEG fault but your own. Take a course in Camera Exposure 101. Professional photographers like those of National Geographic used slide film. What you got was what you got. They did a good job too, none of this having to use RAW to correct their shots.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>What that has to do with journalistic integrity is beyond me. Why not ban all crops while you're at it, James? If you don't get it right the first time in camera, toss it.</p>

<p>Of course, we know that pros always nail the exposure and the crop the first time, right?</p>

<p>James, you're talking nonsense. Plenty of over-the-top manipulation occurs with JPEGs as well as raw. Banning raw is not going to stop abuses.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I shot about 40,000 images for my biggest client this year, I do corporate journalism for them. I just went and checked, 37 were in RAW. I love JPEG, it is like shooting chrome.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>You're welcome to it, Daniel.</p>

<p>Shades of the old film v. digital debates!</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>I'm quite a bit less worried about creeping bias in photojournalism and journalism itself coming from whether photos are shot in jpg or RAW than I am about how biased both are in terms of what actually gets shot and shown and what is said about it in accompanying headlines, captions, and text. Reuters has focused on something utterly superficial and easy, which is just what they expect the public to buy as they convince that gullible public that this is an important step toward lack of bias, which it's not. While this story says nothing about photo manipulation, it says a whole lot about how easily the public can be manipulated.</p>

Reuters doesn't want to recieve artist's impressions of the news.<br>That is not about bias, journalistic integrity or gullible audiences. It is about being fed up with asking photographers for photos and instead receiving the result of photographer's free expression and their 'personal' (i.e. the tricks raw-processing software has to offer) take on visual arts.<br>Think television and how when the machines that made it easy became widely available we were bored to death by all sorts of 'interesting' wipes and other effects. Or how over use of a compressor turned almost everything you hear/heard from the radio into one long and continuous intrusive shout. Photography, press photography in particular, now suffers a similar phenomenon thanks to raw processing tools and overly enthousiastic photographers, confused about their role, who do need to be told to tone it down.

<p>Daniel is 100% correct. The vast majority of news shooters shoot JPG, so this isn't really much of as huge a deal as people make out. A friend of mine is runs a large bureau for Reuters and it's all based on a JPG workflow. Seconds make a difference in the news cycle, there is no time, or need for RAW. These people shoot all day, everyday. They actually do "get it right in camera".<br>

But it gets the armchair expert JPG v RAW gang all wound up, that's for sure.</p>

<p>So this goes on - I always heard and probably believed "a (good) picture is worth a thousand words" it was so in analogue days just as it is now, the clever and effective photographer has always known that ramping up or merely presenting what they know to be "in" an image is, and always has been what their trade has always been about, Reuters rules won't change this and armchair experts, as is being slurred are definitely not be the issue as is being claimed.</p>