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Compressed vs. Uncompressed.

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by Karl Egressy on Tue Aug 11, 2020 8:39 am

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I'm getting familiar with my new Sony a7 III.
Everything is clear except compressed, uncompressed. (Learned most of it when using a6600)
On the card it looks like the compressed takes up about half the size of the uncompressed.
However, when I do the RAW file conversion on DOX PhotoLab 3 Elite, the size difference disappears so is when opening in Photoshop CS5.
Based on that I should use the compressed format in the camera.
Any penalty with compressed setting I just don't observe?
Thanks for the advice.

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by Scott Fairbairn on Tue Aug 11, 2020 11:56 am

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Some info here at the links below. IMO, for normal shooting(basically 99% of shooting I do of birds, animals, macro, etc) where there isn't a lot of contrasting edges that may require heavy post-processing, I use compressed RAW. But when I shoot challenging targets like astronomical targets and night time work, I use uncompressed just to get every bit of post-processing quality.

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/61444 ... ressed-raw
https://photographylife.com/compressed- ... ressed-raw

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by Karl Egressy on Tue Aug 11, 2020 12:28 pm

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Thanks for the info and links, Scott. So let's try compressed for birds.

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by E.J. Peiker on Tue Aug 11, 2020 12:35 pm

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Avoid compressed for night and astro photography, other than that, compressed is OK. Sony is epically failing - they are THE ONLY camera company that does not have a lossless compressed RAW format.

E.J. Peiker http://www.EJPhoto.com
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/EJ-Peiker-Nature-Photographer/

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