Shooting in raw pt 2 - Panasonic DMC-FZ1000

Continuing the story of raw vs jpeg, here are some photos from a Panasonic Lumix. The jpeg processing here is very different to the canon - and preserves more detail especially in the well exposed areas. But the opportunity to recover very dark and very bright areas is still greatly reduced when starting with a jpeg.
Here's the first comparative photo - saved simultaneously as raw and jpeg, so the same photo at heart.

First, here is the jpeg file, cropped right into 797 x 443 pixels and following is the raw, imported into lightroom with exposure +.05, contrast +7, Clarity +5, Luminance Noise Reduction 48 and Color Noise Reduction 30. (without noise reduction, the image is fairly noisy - the picture was shot at iso 1600.

The cameras built in jpeg conversion here looks very good - certainly as far as detail preservation goes, much better than the canons (and the canon photos were shot at ISO 100). As regards detail there is little to choose between them without going into very carefully tweaked raw conversion.

The colour handling of the printed fabric colours is pretty much the same, although there is a bit of gritiness around the colour edges that looks like it could be over sharpening or jpeg compression artifacts, look at the originals to see this more clearly. There is also the strong brown cast which is the shadow from the arm of the chair (the wooden frame is dark varnish). this looks definitely overdone in the jpeg version.

Lifting dark areas

There's not a lot of dark in these photos, but I found a small corner just to the left of the first crop area. Here is that area as it appears initially ( no processing on the jpeg, same tweaks as above on the raw). The crop here is tighter so these images are pixel for pixel.

Jpeg first as before, and apart from the gritiness in the jpeg, there's not  alot to choose between them.

In an extreme attempt to get back the dark detail (although extreme, I do use this much to recover dark area detail) lets set the Shadows to +100:

 As before, jpeg is first and the jpeg processing has lost too much detail. The wood texture has gone flat and splodgy, and the really dark bit has lost smooth gradation. While this wouldn't be too bad in a small corner, trying to recover a large area of dark like this will result in splodges and banding with little hope of seeing any detail there may be in there.

Here is the raw version, the wooden spindles look a lot more natural, and still look round rather than flat. In the dark pool area behind there is a smooth dradation. If there was anything to see in there it still be visible - albeit a bit grainy - but that can be easily fixed.

Bringing back the highlights

up in the top left of the image theres an area with blown highlights - a bit beyond the depth of field, but we'll have look.

 Here's the jpeg version first

And the raw version. Again not really  a great deal between them, a little more saturation in the jpeg.

Here is the jpeg with shadows back to zero and highlights at -100. It's all gone a bit pear shaped really, quite big lumps of flat white and strange effects on the some of the remaining colours.

With the raw there are still areas of flat white (this was seriously blown!), but they are much smaller than in the jpeg, and the colours have not been as damaged.

While a more detailed approach with photoshop might get back some of the damage to the colour areas, the areas that are flat white have gone forever, and with raw files these areas are always smaller - and with care when taking the photgraph, can easily be avoided or made insignificantly small.