Reuters Bans RAW Photo Format (petapixel.com)

grcumb writes: Reuters is the latest agency to join the ranks of the technically clueless who think that ethical problems can be solved using technical means. They recently issued a circular to their contributors, stating in part: "In future, please don't send photos to Reuters that were processed from RAW or CR2 files. If you want to shoot raw images that's fine, just take JPEGs at the same time. Only send us the photos that were originally JPEGs, with minimal processing...." The problem they claim to be addressing is doctored images, but they don't explain how they plan to ensure that the JPEGs weren't simply exported from RAW files with their EXIF data altered, or heck, just altered as JPEG. They also assert that getting JPEG files straight from the camera is quicker, which is fair enough. Lots of professionals shoot with RAW+JPEG at newsworthy events. They can send the JPEGs off quickly to meet the first deadline, then process the RAW files at leisure for higher quality publications.

Comments

If they are Doctoring, WHY do they work there?

[Zymergy]

As a former photojournalist, I can saw that you simply blacklist them and/or fire them from being a contributor/stringer/staffer at that image bureau. There are ethical standards in the professional photography world, and it is nothing bad to those of us who upheld our high ethical standards to see someone get fired for unethically altering images and cheating and breaking the rules. I doubt this is as much a problem from a "who altered their photos?" problem as it is the photographers are submitting larger files (even if lossy down converted into JPG from RAW) and Reuters is having problems handling so many large files in their infrastructure and pushing photos out in distribution to their newsroom client "on the wire" servers. I know in my past when dealing with AP, if you uploaded a file that was too large they either rejected it, or WORSE, applied their lossy compression using whatever software they saw fit. When what your image looks like is everything to a shooter, and when a perfect images is ruined by crap third party compression due to file size, the lesson is hard learned and PJ folks are pretty savvy getting the best bang per MB.

Re:Terrible summary

[grcumb]

While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news. [...] Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.

Which doesn't mean they're trying to prevent people from faking photos; as that line is clearly referring to the "minimal editing" part of the above guidelines, and the "JPG not RAW" is just for workflow-related reasons.

Yes, they're being euphemistic and mashing over-processing in with outright manipulation, because I doubt Reuters would win a lot of friends among the professional photography establishment if they implied that their contributors were a bunch of crooks.

But the point of the thing is that 'minimal editing' has nothing to do with the format you capture your images in. And furthermore, it's easier to track 'minimal editing' with RAW than it is in JPEG, because editing tools actually maintain an audit trail of sorts. The bottom line is that the measure does nothing to get them where they want to go, except in the minds of a few not-so-sophisticated editors.

Full disclosure: I'm media director of the newspaper of record in a small country, a news photographer who has contributed to wire services, and a geek. I also wrote this submission. And I do not find it one iota easier to manage JPEG files than RAW in our newspaper's workflow. In fact, JPEG is a pain the ass compared to RAW, especially when you're targeting multiple media with the same image. Because the shot you upload to your website is going to be significantly different in size, colour and compression from the one that goes to pre-press. If you take them both from the same canonical source (or Nikonical source, if that's your poison), then life is much, much easier.

Re: Is a JPEG at 0% compression a RAW image?

[dgatwood]

I would suspect that "often" is really "always". A typical Canon RAW file, for example, has 14 bits per pixel. Because of the extra precision, the effective dynamic range of a RAW file is dramatically wider than the dynamic range of a JPEG image. For example, if you have the following samples in the RAW image:

65500, 65532, 65515, 65533, 65473, 65535

And you convert that to JPEG, you'll get:

255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255

Iff you later need to pull the highs down to make them less blown out, if you're starting with the RAW image, you'll get a fairly accurate rendition of those values (up to the limits of the sensor), whereas if you start with the JPEG image, you'll get white blotches, because there's no detail there to recover. For recovering highlights and/or shadows, JPEG doesn't even come close to RAW, and can't. There's just too much data lost.