P: Capability to display embedded preview or sidecar Jpeg

Hey all. This thread has gotten wildly off course from the original intent, which was in reference to a performance enhancement that PhotoMechanic takes advantage of, where it reads the JPG that has been hidden inside the RAW file by the camera, rather than trying to process the RAW on the fly.

That said, there seems to be some confusion about what you might expect from a RAW file. For those of you who are surprised when the camera enhancements aren't applied to the RAWs - that's not a failure of LR. LR is showing you exactly the data you fed to it. RAW files are, by their very nature, not processed. They are a "container" if you will (as all files are containers) that hold the exact, unedited, unmodified, unadulterated data that the sensor captured. Those effect settings that your camera has are taking the image data, running a "photoshop filter," then storing the result as a JPG. Doing this same thing to a RAW file simply isn't possible. (If you're curious why, Google about Bayer arrays and mosaicked image data. Cambridge in Color has a great article about how your sensor works.)

So why does the image appear to be filtered when looking at the back screen, even though you're shooting RAW? Simple. As mentioned above, your camera is hiding a JPG inside the RAW file. (Don't confuse this with your RAW + JPG mode, I mean literally a JPG inside the RAW file.) When you review images on the camera, effects have been applied to those hidden JPGs, but NOT to the RAW data. This is why settings such as color space, noise reduction, special effects profiles, etc etc all appear in the preview image on the back screen of your camera, but have absolutely zero impact on the actual RAW data that you're working with in LR. That preview on your camera screen is not the RAW data. It is only the embedded JPG preview.

I would encourage you to shoot without those (questionable) in-camera special effects, and learn to get the results you like directly in LR from the RAW data you captured. Hope this helps a bit. Now let's please get back to this thread being about a potential "performance mode" for culling in LR.

Cheers!

thanks Mark / Rob for the responses - seems I've more digging to do, I've also tried replacing effects I want in Lightroom, which isn't so easy - I guess the trick for me is remembering that I took photos in a mode that lightroom doesn't natively handle well and treating them differently to the rest - I think some practice and following your pointers is in order.

It's not sooo bad (treating raw & jpeg separately) if you stack them. Whichever is above hides the inactive version. Also, consider RawPlusJpeg plugin to help manage (it's free, and I wrote it).

hallo Chris,
i agree with you. I was coming from nx2 to lightroom and didn't understand why my nef were so noisy and ugly with respect to my jpg. i have spent weeks to try to use plugins to use nx2 from lightroom,... and corrupted several times my lr database. so i have decided to lean lightroom more and have purchased ononesoftware and topazlab suites and i am really happy now.
lightroom 5.7 is so fantastic that auto works nice with small manual retouching.
so based on my experience, i would shoot nef and add artistic with topazlab on pc.
i am sure you will spare lot of time and will be fully happy

br
marc

This is a massive problem for me - I've spent money on Lightroom so that I can make the most of my decent camera and then discover that anything my camera handles in JPG format (eg the art filters) is buried unless I handle jpg & raw separately which damages the organisational capability of lightroom. This seems a very basic oversight!

Everyone he is a solution http://photographylife.com/how-to-get...

Agreed, Chris. A simple toggle switch is all we need.

I'm really considering switching to a different software if this feature won't be added in the next release ....

I'm late to this party, but just want to add my vote. My preference is to do as much as possible in one piece of software, and at the moment, for me that is Lightroom.

My key requirement is to easily toggle between RAW and jpeg for a single image, with shared meta-data and the ability to select which one is the primary. That would allow me to use the jpeg for happy-snaps or where the quality is good enough, or switch to RAW for any serious post-processing.

Also nice to have:
- ability to toggle the grid view between all-RAW, all-jpeg and mixed user-selections.
- default initial post-import view to jpeg to avoid the need to render (or maybe user-defined preference?)
- ability to do all this from the emedded jpeg (not sure what value there would be in shooting / importing/storing both seperately if you had easier access to the embedded jpeg?)

Given the amount / length of the debate here and on other forums I'm not optimistic about progress. However, having recently made the step-up to more serious cameras, and started to explore the possibilities of RAW I've been astonished by the way I'm forced to choose one workflow or the other up-front.

Improvements in jpeg quality and growth of Micro 4/3 and other compact-ish Interchangeable Lens Cameras are blurring the boundaries between the 'point & shoot' and 'serious full-frame' worlds. I've now read many heated threads about the RAW vs jpeg, and think it's high time there was better support for working in a seemless way to get the best of both worlds.

Don't see the need for an additional module - just the ability to toggle the normal library view between RAW and the embedded jpeg....