What program do you use for post-processing?

[Ramsayfarian]

Originally Posted by freeweed

Just to confirm some thoughts on here - if you're in the least bit using a camera worth more than $100, or you're doing any sort of photo editing whatsoever, especially if you're using terms like "post-processing"...

Don't use JPEGs. Ever. They're an evil format designed for posting pictures on the interwebs back in the day when bandwidth was limited. By design, they're "lossy" meaning you lose image information just by creating one, but it's even worse - you lose information every single time you make an edit and save again.

I'm far from a quality nut, my camera is probably worth $50 right now, and it's been a few years since I even bothered touching up any image at all. But I've worked in image editing software and played around with various format specifications, and NO ONE who does even remotely serious photography should use JPEGs for anything other than posting to Facebook or Flickr. Disk (and flash card) space is cheap. Saving space by sacrificing quality is idiotic in this day and age.

While there have been some serious improvements to the format in recent years, it's still basically shit when it comes to serious image handling. It's the equivalent of buying a Ferrari and dressing it up to look like a Cavalier. If you're going to play with JPEGs, you might as well just get a cheap P&S camera and accept the default options in the first place. Because all those megapixels, high end lenses, SLR features... they're basically useless once you run them through JPEG compression a few times. You'll degrade your picture quality down to the point where you can't tell the difference.

Sadly, most P&S cameras still only let you take JPEG off the camera - but it's easy enough to convert to a proper format (TIFF, etc) on the computer. At least you're only dealing with a single generation loss.

(Obviously I'm being a tad dramatic, but honestly - the number of people I know who have $2000+ in camera gear that compress the shit out of their images is staggering)

Bigtime was referring to flickr so in his case JPEG is fine. If you shoot in RAW, Lightroom does't create a JPEG until you export it. The only time I'm exporting is if I'm uploading or emailing a picture.