rfdesigner said:
NancyP said:
I might point out that Reuters is a news agency and not a post-processing lab. If you waste a lot of time post-processing the RAW file "just so", your competitor photographer has likely delivered usable jpgs and the jpgs will have been posted by the time you finish putzing with the file. Look, it's a 24 second news cycle, not a 24 hour news cycle nowadays.
my gut feel is that reuters wants photos that are not processed unduely so that the posisbility of faked images is reduced.
Question is.. how can they tell the difference between a JPEG produced from a raw image and one straight from camera?.. surely at most the difference is just a detail in the EXIF that could be faked anyway.
Any image can be photoshop'd so the first paragraph doesn't make sense.
It's what NancyP said - Reuters don't want to waste time creating an image, they want the finished product. They don't care if it is JPEG out of your DSLR, iPhone or Photoshop. Just don't expect them to spend time doing "photograph developing."
Sports photographers nearly always shoot JPEG and not just for performance reasons. They shoot lots of images that they will throw away so they don't want to fill up storage space with lots of garbage. Similarly they don't want to waste time "getting the image right in post" - they aim to get it right when the shutter button is pushed so that they spend more time out taking photographs and less time in the office "developing photographs." Plus what newspapers, etc, want from them isn't raw files (which may or may not work with their software.)
Agencies, etc, need to be able to take output from the latest camera as soon as it hits the shelves. They don't want to complicate their workflow with needing the latest copy of raw conversion software from each camera maker nor be reliant on ACR, etc, to accept images from photographers. So they arrive at the "lowest common denominator" - which is JPEG. Anything else costs time and money that is of questionable benefit.
Imagine being Reuters: a car bomb goes off in New York and images start pouring in. On the one hand you've got submissions in JPEG that you can use immediately and sell on to others "now" and on the other hand you've got submissions in XYZ's raw format that you need to hand off to someone specific to render before selling. On the one hand you've got a finished product, on the other you've got a product that is not ready to be sold.
btw, I'm pretty sure that Reuters isn't alone in this and that other agencies (such as Getty) and newspapers in general will all only take submissions in JPEG format.
