Nikon D7000 JPEG fine vs. JPEG basic evaluation

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fips
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Nikon D7000 JPEG fine vs. JPEG basic evaluation

Post by fips »

I like shooting both NEF + JPEG. Why JPEGs you might ask. Well, there are two reasons for that. First, I use JPEGs as a quick preview after downloading pictures from my camera, they also come in handy when I need to quickly send pictures to my friends in a zipped package or each time I need a single picture for Internet use. Second, and more important, I find it essential to preserve the exact images as produced by the camera because all the software engines for RAW processing (like Lightroom that I use) actually produce quite different results compared to what you get from the in-camera engine (EXPEED 2 in the case of my D7000). So it's a good idea to keep a reference to see how the camera would process the image. This was especially useful in the early days of Lightroom when the default RAW=>JPEG conversion looked just awful, JPEGs coming directly from the camera looked much better (in some cases, it might be the case even these days).

Since D7000 produces rather big JPEGs in the FINE quality setting (up to 9 MB from my experience), which seems to be a big waste of space, I've decided to compare JPEG Fine vs. JPEG Basic to evaluate if JPEG Basic is good enough for me. You might find the results below. As you can see, at 100%, it's not possible to see any difference, which I think, is both quite interesting and welcome, especially if you compare the sizes of the images: 6 vs. 2 MB. You have to go at 500% to see JPEG artifacts! So that means that they are practically invisible in terms of human perception.

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