Using Smart Collections to improve your Lightroom Workflow

Sometimes life involves some waiting around.  You find yourself waiting for news from hospitals and other such places, not really able to concentrate on anything important yet trying to find something to do to pass the time.

Fairly recently I found myself in such a situation and looking for something to do to pass the time.  Flicking around Lightroom I came across the smart Collection called "Without Keywords".  I thought that most of my image collection was keyworded,  boy was I wrong.  There were 15,000 pictures in that collection!

If you ever need something mind numming and repetitive to do,  I can recommend keywording 15,000 pictures.

So how had this happened?  I have quite a thought out and orderly workflow,  but I must be missing stuff.
Though a lot of the problem stuff was from an older time before I got more disciplined.

It seems that I need a way to check that I am sticking to my processes and the "without Keywords" smar collection got me thinking.  Why not define my entire archive process a series of smart collections.

So,  how do I create a smart collection that lets me know if I have forgotten to put a location against any of my photos.  Well I have my location keywords in a big hierarchical structure based in a root keyword of "Places":



So if I create a smart collection like this:

Any pictures that appear in it have not had a place added on the keywords.

I have created a series of smart collections that allow me to see easily how far I am through my archival process:

Some of the smart collections are simply place holders to remind me to do stuff:

How to create exhibition Labels

Quit a few people have asked how I create the labels I use for my exhibitions.  I thought I would share the technique I use here.

1. I first create the labels, using a customised version of my Lemon Limited Edition Management system.
2. Any additional documents, like the exhibition cover story and details of how to purchase the shots are created in Word.
3. I print very light grey dashed cutting lines round each label to make the process easier.
4. I print all the items on to premium glossy paper to give them a professional finish, don't print right to the edge as you need to allow a bit for trimming off.
5. Once the prints have dried, it's time to wander outside and coat the back of each with spray mount.
   
6. Then stick each print down to a sheet of foamboard.
   
   
7. Leave to dry.
8. Now use a ruler and stanley knife(with a fresh blade) and cut each of the labels to size, following the guidelines printed on each label.  Having a proper cutting mat underneath allows you to cut cleanly all the way through without wrecking your table, and more importantly, blunting your knife.
   
   
9. After a short while you should have a nice stack of lovely labels!

Why Two Lightroom Catalogs ?

Following my post on automatically deleting Lightroom backups, I was asked why I have two different Lightroom catalogs.  Well the reason for this is that I like to separate my recent images from my archive of images.

My working catalogue contains the images I am currently working on and the archive contains images that are finished.  Once a month I move the images from the previous month to the archive.

There are a few reasons for me working in this way.  The first is that I find the process of archiving images stops me constantly looking at shots to see if there is any way I can improve them.  If I didn't do that I would still be looking at shots I took in may 2006 thinking "I wonder what that looks like in B&W".

The other main reason, is that it  is really easy to put off keywording and classifying images,  as part of the archival process I like to make sure that they are all classified correctly.  My checklist for archiving is:

• Delete all the images that don't make the grade
• Keyword every image with the location it was taken
• Keyword any shots to identify any dogs & people.
• Apply Star ratings.
• Add Title & Descriptions to the good ones.
• ctrl + A and ctrl + s to write the metadata to the files
• Export the files to a new library
• Import in to the Archive.
• Add pictures to the collections for my various websites

Am I unusual in using multiple catalogues or  is it a common thing.  Why not leave a comment & let me know how you use Lightroom catalogues.

Lightroom Archive format - TIFF or PSD ?

Having established that it would be a good idea to save the result of any editing I do in Lightroom in to an archival format, an email flooded in asking why I chose tiff format rather than psd.

Well my gut feel is that tiff is a well understood format supported by lots of vendors, whereas psd seems to be a bit more tied into Photoshop. But my guts and their feelings are not of interest to most right thinking people. So I can do no better than quote this post by Jeff Schewe:

.PSD is now a bastardized file format that is NOT a good idea to use. Even the Photoshop engineers will tell you that PSD is no longer the Photoshop "native" file format. It has no advantages and many disadvantages over TIFF.

TIFF is publicly documented, PSD is not. That makes TIFF a preferred file format for the long term conservation of digital files.

TIFF uses ZIP compression for max compression, PSD uses RLE which if you save without the Max compatibility will be a bit smaller, but at the risk of not being able to be used by apps, like Lightroom.

TIFF can save EVERYTHING a PSD can save including layers, paths, channels, transparency, annotations and can go up to 4 GIGS in file size. TIFF can save all the color spaces PSD can. The ONLY thing I can think of that PSD can save that currently TIFF can't save is if you Save out of Camera Raw a cropped PSD, you can uncrop the PSD in Photoshop CS, CS2 or 3. That's one tiny obscure thing that PSD can do that TIFF currently doesn't. How many people even knew that let alone use it?

PSD used to be the preferred file format back before Adobe bastardized it for the Creative Suite. The moment that happened, PSD ceased to be a Photoshop "native" file format. PSB is the new Photoshop "native" file format for images beyond 30,000 pixels. And , at the moment, only Photoshop can open a PSB.

Getting back to the fist point, Adobe can do anything including stopping support for PSD because it's a proprietary file format. TIFF is public, even if it's owned by Adobe (by virtue of the Aldus purchase). Even if Adobe went belly up tomorrow, TIFF would continue.

And, let me be blunt, anybody who thinks PSD is "better" than TIFF is ignorant of the facts. If Adobe would let them, the Photoshop engineers would tell you to quit using PSD. Lightroom for the first beta did NOT support PSD and Hamburg fought tooth and nail to prevent having to accept PSD. He blinked, but you still can't import a PSD without Max compat enabled-which basically makes it a TIFF with a PSD extension.

Look, I'll make it REAL simple...

TIFF = Good
PSD = Bad

Ok?

If only Jeff wouldn't sit on the fence so much, we would know what he really felt about the matter!

Lightroom - Do I need to save my edited shots?

So, as regular readers will be aware, I am slowly moving my workflow to Lightroom. It's a fun project and has given me the opportunity to reassess the way I currently work & compare it with other photographers.

My goal, is to follow "best practice" for digital image management whilst minimising the amount of work I actually have to do in front of the computer. So I am spending a lot of time reading blogs, books & forum posts as to how others manage their workflow and working out which will be right for me.

One of the considerations a digital photographer has to take into account is how many copies of each image to store. If you are not careful it can easily become a nightmare. First you have your original raw file. Then you might have one or two tiff files associated with it as your finally developed image. Finally you end up with s numerous jpgs sized for various output mediums (web, print, magazine submissions, etc). If your not careful it could all end up looking like the tide line on a Cornish Beach:

Cornish Crap
(Click to view large)

A while back I decided that I would only keep the original raw file & the finished tiff file for each of my images. Using QImage I could print the tiff file in any size I choose, so there was no need to store versions at different print sizing. Jpgs are really just an output format, so I don't keep them as they can be recreated at any time from the tiffs.

So for a long time I have had only one version of my images (the tiff) , I kept the raw files so I can go back to the raws if I need to, and all is right with the world. But then along came Lightroom2 and it's targeted adjustments...

One of the big things that you hear about Lightroom2 is that it features "Non-destructive editing" . Unlike photoshop, your original image is safe no matter what you do to it as all that is stored is your original image and a history of the changes you made to it. In order to undo something you just go back as far a you like in that history. For people who shoot jpgs this is a major advance - your originals are safe with Lightroom. For Raw shooters it's really not such a big deal, no raw converter changes your raw files, they simply generate a tiff or a jpg.

But Lightroom's target adjustments change the rules. You can (in a lot of circumstances) just use the Lightroom tools to make the adjustments and never need to go into Photoshop. From Lightroom I can print, show it in a slide-show and even generate any jpgs I might need to send out. So now I only need Lightroom and my raw files - it's time to say goodbye to storing tiff files. This has to be a good thing...doesn't it?

Well as i see it Lightroom is storing a set of instructions on what to do with your image very much like a recipe book tells you what to do with raw ingredients. As we know with recipes, two cooks can follow the same recipe and produce 2 different results, or if the recipe is in English and the chef only speaks French you are going to have lots of problems. Does the same hold true for the recipes we have in Lightroom? Well yes I believe it does.

If our recipe for the perfect picture includes the instruction "increase vibrancy by 30", none of us outside of Adobe really know what calculations Lightroom performs on our files. In a few years time when you are running Lightroom 5.3 on Windows 11 (or OS-X Domestic Moggy or even Google Spangled Metal 3), you have no real guarantee that "increase vibrancy by 30" will produce the same look as it did back in 2009. I am sure Adobe would do their best to keep things consistent but it's not easy to guarantee that as developers try to fix bugs in the code and extend it to add more functionality.

Even more importantly, what happens if Adobe drop support for Lightroom due to it rapidly losing market share to some other new technology coming along? What if it becomes to costly to continue to support the raw format of your files? Now we are in a much, much worse position than we ever were, as now we have an archive of raw files in a proprietary format plus a set of instructions in an equally proprietary format that it may be difficult (if not impossible) to get any other software to understand.

That's why, to me, storing raw + lightroom adjustments is just not an archival format as it cannot be opened by other applications and may produce different result over time. Tiff files I created 5 years ago in Photoshop 7 still open and print just as they always did and I can use a wide variety of software to access them. It's an open and widely used standard, so I think I will be sticking with Tiff files as my format for the moment.

Am I right? why not add a comment below & let me know what you think.

Backing up to the Cloud - Got there in the End!

Hopefully long term readers remember my articles on backing up to the cloud:

Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts

Well I am sure that none of you care but I just thought I would mention that my image archive backup is now complete and safe in the web:

Safe in the Web
(Click to View Large)

My Image archive was 300gb but I decided to got through it & cull a load of images I didn't want and would never use. I know some people keep everything but I really can't see the point in keeping out of focus shots, test shots, etc.

The cull got it down to 150mb and it has since grown back up to 285gb (sheesh those 5DmkII files are big). So it has take 163 days (I lost 10 due to being away) and has averaged 1.74GB a day. That means the system can cope with around 50GB a month of images, which is easily enough for my needs.

Think we can count that as a success and I can rest easy knowing my images are safe.

Using Relative Paths in Lightroom part 2

In part one of these ramblings I noticed that although you could force Lightroom, kicking and screaming, to use relative paths. It's good friend Photoshop was having none of it.

Not to be discouraged I put on my hacking trousers and through together a solution. If there is anyone out there who cares, here is how you fix the problem:

Download This install file and run it in the normal way (press next at all the prompts) - if you don't have the .Net framework 2.0 installed you will need to download & install that too.

Now nip into Lightroom preferences and create a new External Editor.


You need to hit the browse button and chose the program you have just installed (yes I know DaDoRunRun.exe is a rubbish name bt it was the best I could come up with at the time.

Now when you chose to use this External Editor this dialog box will appear:


Just click Edit and a new dialog pops up.


Click on the browse button (...) and point the program to the right path for Photoshop on your machine. Now click OK and all being well Photoshop will open with the correct file.

This is a bit intrusive so next time you call the editor click on the "don't show me this dialog" button and the box will never appear again.


That's it problem solved! Well except that Lightroom won't stack files in different directories. Now that is a weird limitation, I thought the whole point of Lightroom was that directories weren't that important any more - looks like I'm wrong on that one.

I bet no one ever uses this information but, I still feel I should make it available - as a public service. Of course I am happy for someone to post a comment telling me why relative folders are such an evil concept that they should be banished...

Related Posts
Using relative paths in Lightroom part 1

Export iView/Expressions Media Category Sets to Lightroom Hierachical Keywords

As part of my adventures of moving to a Lightroom world, I've started to look at Keywording. Now the Lightroom Hierachical keywords, seem like a really good thing and although I can easily build up a big set of keywords thanks to The Controlled Vocabulary what I really want is to pull in the hierachy of Catalog Sets I spent ages creating in iView.

iView Catalog Set hierarchy for places
(click to view large)

As far as I can see the only real way to get this list would be to recreate this in Lightroom manually. As I didn't fancy all that typing I came up with This Script (which is heavily based on John Beardsworths script I used previously)

To use it all you need to do is change one or two lines in the file:

Change this to the name of the catalog set you wish to export:

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Places"


If you should wish to change the name or location of the file of hierachical keywords you create then this is the line to change.

const filePath = "C:\iViewCategories.txt"


Once you have edited the file, save it in your iview scripts folder. The Open iview with the catalog containing the sets you wish to export. Run the script from the script folder and after a few seconds you should get a "Done" message.

Open lightroom and select the Library module. Select Metadata>Import Keywords and brows to the file you have created C:\iViewCategories.txt and your Keywords should apear as if by magic:

Keyword Hierachy in Lightroom
(Click to view large)

Moving to Lightroom - Sorting the wheat from the chaff

Part of a series of posts detailing my slow move into the brave new world of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

I have my photos split between a working area, which holds the current month and a bit photos and an archive of everything else.
The archive is managed with iview, but the working area is managed by a whole mish-mash of tools including Downloader Pro, BreezeBrowser, Capture One, Photoshop, Qimage and a few custom tweaks and scripts.
The working area is where I will be concentrating on using Lightroom.

Once a month I move the previous months photos from working to archive, before I do that I do the following:
1. Delete all the pictures I don't want to keep 2. Add star ratings 3. Ensure all metadata is written to the files correctly

Item 1 was my first candidate for Lightroomification. At the moment it is a relativly simple process of opening each directory in Breezebrowser, running a slideshow (ctrl A, ctrl S), tagging each reject (up arrow), then selecting all rejects (f6) and pressing delete.

So is this any easier in Lightroom? In the Library module I an select the entire months images in one go...which is better. I can then run in "Lights out mode" (L,L) using the arrow keys to move through the images and flag the rejects (x to reject, U if you accidentally rejected something), then use the delete rejects option and you are done.

The big advantage of doing this in Lightroom is you get to see the post-processed images, rather than the jpeg preview you get on Breezebrowser, this can make a lot of difference. There is consequently a delay sometimes in building the previews but it doesn't seem particularly onerous & you don't have to wait for it to complete. I'm not sure what else Adobe do to the previews but they do look really good in LR for some reason.

The only option I really miss from my old way of doing things is a quick B&W view. In breezebrowser I can simply press ctrl+w and the image is displayed in black & white, pressing it again switches to colour. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent to this in Lightroom*.

So far it looks like a win for Lightroom.

*Oh hang on a sec - looks like pressing V does that...marvellous!

Lightroom and Iview Web Galleries

Regular readers will know that I use iview to generate my web galleries incorporating a Paypal shopping cart as I detailed here.

Phil Thomas contacted me to point out that although he had put the title of each picture into the metadata in Lightroom the titles were not appearing in the paypal shopping basket when he generated the galleries from iview.

It turns out that the field that Lightroom uses for "Document Title" in Photoshop maps to "Product" in iview... so the solution is fairly easy. If you look through the media.html file you will see the line:


<input name="item_name" value="(iView:Headline) (iView:Item1Description)" type="hidden" >


repeated for each of the different items you are selling (item1Description will become item2Description on the next entry).

(iView:Headline) inserts the iview headline field into the code, so all we need to do is replace that with (iView:Product) and we are sorted. If you would rather use the filename simply replace (iview:headline) with (iview:filename) on each of these entries. Or you could even just put (iView:Headline) (iView:Product) (iView:filename) and get all three values in the text. If you want to use other fields take a look at the documentation here.

The alternative is to copy the product field to the headline field in iview, so here is a little iview script to automate that process for you.

Thanks for pointing this out Phil - saved me finding the problem myself.

Related Posts
Creating an ECommerce Site with iView and Paypal
Using The Controlled Vocabulary with iView Media Pro
Alternative template for iView Media Pro and the PayPal Shopping cart

Is Lightroom the Rightroom to be in?

For sometime now I have been advising people who asked me, to use Adobe Lightroom to manage their workflow. This is because Lightrom offers a structured environment for you to manage your photos in and there are plenty of examples workflows available for you to follow.

But the thing is, I don't use Lightroom myself...so why not ? Well I have a workflow that is very organised already and uses a whole wedge of different software and tools to get the results I want. So Lightroom's all-in-one model doesn't particularly hold a great set of advantages for me. I tried Lightroom 1 and wasn't hugely impressed as it seemed to lock you into its ow view of the world and so didn't fit too easily into my workflow.

I have been meaning to take a look at Lightroom 2 for a long time, but it has been difficult to find the time until now. I recently was hit by the swine flu virus and consequently spent a lot of time laying exhausted around the house. Having bored myself senseless with daytime TV, I decided that it might be worth taking a look at Lightroom.

I spent the small amount of time I had between sleeping and coughing, watching the Adobe video guides to Lightroom and I have to say that it does look rather good. It still feels a bit "claustrophobic" to me and i have a feeling I will soon be learning LUA (The scripting language of Lightroom) to get round what i see as the limitations. But it does seem to be worth a play with now.

I have ordered a couple of books so I'll be reading them over the next few weeks and working out the best way to integrate it into my workflow. I'll let you know what I discover.

iView/Expressions Media Catalog sets to keywords

My long term archive of images is indexed in iview media pro. I still haven't bothered to move to Microsoft Expressions Media yet as there don't seem to be any killer reasons to do the upgrade.
I generate my web galleries from iview using my own custom template, everything is automated and life is good.

I noticed the other day that although I use the (iview:keywords) tag to put all my keywords as metadata into the generated HTML pages, a fair bit of the information I am recording is not being inserted in the files because it is held in catalog sets.



Catalog sets are the iview way of providing a hermetical structure to your metadata. My main use of catalog sets is for locations, for example the image above would be in the Horsey Mill set,which automatically infers that it is also in the Horsey, Norfolk Broads, Norfolk, England and UK sets.


So what I really need is a way to collapse the catalog sets into the keywords field before I create my web galleries. I figured this would need a script to work out which catalog sets apply to an image and then to put them into the keywords metadata for the image.

Searching around the web found a lot of rumours of such a thing but none lead to the code, until finally I came accross this post by John Beardsworth. I simply took Johns code and edited the line:

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Keywords"

and replaced the word "Keywords" with the name of the top level catalog set I want to flattern into the keywords i.e.

Const ivKeywordSetName = "Places"

then run it on the selected images. It worked perfectly..hurrah!

Let your gass out

At home I have a whole series of photo frames and from time to time I like to swap the contents of them. One of the things I have noticed is that often when I open the frame a ghost image has appeared on the inside of the glass.

As the image doesn't touch the glass - how does it happen? Well apparently it is caused by solvents in the inks "out gassing". I came across this article that explains why this fogging occurs and how to stop it.

Thurne (Coming to a wall near me soon)
Click to view larger

In a nutshell Epson recommend:

1. After printing, let the print rest for 15 minutes.
2. After 15 minutes, place a sheet of plain paper (not photo paper) on top of the print and let
dry for 24 hours. The paper acts like a sponge to absorb the gasses and accelerate the
outgassing. (You may stack the prints if you are printing more than one. Be sure to
interleave each print with a sheet of plain paper.)
3. After 24 hours, remove the plain paper. You may notice the plain paper is wavy. If it is,
repeat the procedure again with a new sheet of paper for another 24 hours, after which the
print should be ready for framing. If it is not wavy, this indicates that the solvents in the
print should now be completely dry and the print should be ready for framing
immediately.

I'll have to try this and see how it goes.

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Related Posts

Mounting and Finishing Photograpraphs

Remember The Milk

Well I have managed to stick to one of my New Years Resolutions (from last year) - I suppose there is a first time for everything!

My resolution was to get more organised. There were hundreds of things that I had promised people, decided to do or needed to be done and I was drowning in a sea of disorganisation. I would spend whole weekends doing things that weren't particularly important and then realise that I should have been doing something else.

What I needed was to get myself organised.

What I needed to do was get a jobs to do list organized, prioritise it, add diary entries for repeating items and generally sort out what I should be doing when. I found the ideal tool for this: RememberTheMilk.com. RTM (as it's known to its friends) is a brilliantly simple application for managing your todo list.

First thing I did was to go through, all the emails I had marked, notes I had written, things in my head and add them as a list of things to do. Next I added any repetitions, for instance I like to archive off my work once a month, check my backups once a month, and put the rubbish out every week. Finally I marked the tasks that were important.

Now it is simply a question of adding dates in to do things, I like the way the system takes entries like "Wednesday", "next thursday", "2 weeks" and a whole host of similar entries. Each week I shuffle round all the things to do so I hit whatever deadlines I have.

So what makes it so much better than a paper list or any of the various other options. Well I like the fact that I can have my todo list wherever I need it. I have it showing on my Netvibes page, any web browser I can get to, I can use it off-line on my laptop thanks to Google Gears, and even on my mobile all for free.

The second feature I like is that your todo list comes with it's own (hard for spammers to guess) email address. Forward an email to this and it becomes a task. So when an order comes in from my website I have a rule set up in my email client that automatically forwards the order onto my todo list as a high priority task.

I can also have shared todo lists wih my wife, so we can see which jobs we need to tell each other to do.

It's a really useful bit of software and it's free..we like that.

Lemon (Limited Edition Managment ONline) - now available for those without MS Access

It seems that quite a few people who wanted to use my Limited Edition management system were put off by the need to purchase Microsoft access to run it. To get round this, I have created a version that uses the free Microsoft Access runtime.

You can download the latest version of Lemon from here.


The current release features:

• Keep track of editions and sales easily from one screen.
• Block Allocate ~ reserve a group of prints for a particular customer.
• Certificates of Authenticity.
• Print Run ~ Mark a group of prints as printed and generate the appropriate certificates.
• Sales reports.
• AutoAllocate © ~ When creating an edition numbers can be automatically allocated.

Big Prints

There are few times in my life when I have unrolled the contents of a cardboard tube and exclaimed "wow" but this weekend was one of them!

I have just had some large A1 sized prints made of some of my favourite pictures and I have to say I am very impressed. Up till now I have not bothered getting large prints done as finding a supplier who can reliably reproduce images at a reasonable price can be a bit of a pain, I often have been disappointed with the results…but not now!

My prints were produced by Dave Newton of Photopositive, for those of you who don’t know Dave he is the technical editor of CPN (Canon Professional Network) and EOS Magazine and more importantly he is very, very picky. Years of testing cameras and lenses means that he knows "pin sharp" from just "sharp" and he knows a good colour rendition from a bad one. Dave’s site features printing services, which uses a simple 4 part process to produce your prints:

• Preparation - simply sort out the pics you want printed and create a text file explaining what you want printed.
  
• Upload - either ftp or snail-mail the files.
  
• Payment - The site features a rather wizzy javascript calculator that works out the pricing for you. You then click the paypal button to pay (using either your paypal account or a credit card).
  
• Wait - for your prints soon your prints will arrive through your (or even your customers) door.

Defences at Dawn (looks great printed large)
(Click to view large)

Now I have a reliable supplier, it won't be long before I am offering large prints of some of my more popular shots.

Lemon ~ Limited Edition Managment ONLine, Access97 Release

I have had a couple of mails from people trying to use my Limited Edition Management System (LEMON) on Access97 and failing miserably.

For these poor souls I have created LEMON for Access 97, I hope you find it of use.

And for no apparent reason here is a picture I took in Southwark Cathedral the other day as part of my Friday Lunchtime Project:

Remembrance
(Click to view Large)

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Related Posts

Lemon ~ Limited Edition Management ONline

How to Automatically delete Capture One V4 Cache Files

One of the regular complaints about Capture One V4 is the way it fills up your various directories with its cache and setting files. Personally I have no need to archive or back these up so I wanted a way to remove them from all the sub directories in one go.

In the end I came up with the following solution - but it only works for windows users so you chaps with nice shiny Macs will have to use something else...sorry!

Select and copy the following line:
FOR /R "c:\Working" %%a IN (CaptureOne) DO RMDIR /S /Q "%%a"

Open Notepad and paste in the text
Replace c:\working with the name of the directory where you keep your photos;
i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\Chris\My Documents\My Pictures
Save the file as C1.bat on your C: drive.

Now when you double click on c1.bat in Explorer, all the Capture One temporary files will be removed as if by magic.

Photoshop Shiny Chrome Effect

Here is a little Photoshop technique I developed the other day to make shiny metal really shiny (click on any image to view a large version).

First duplicate the layer:


Run the High-Pass filter with a large number of pixels so that the shiny areas get emphasised.



Finally then just change the layer blend mode to soft-light ( or hard-light) to make it all shiny:

Nuts - Canary Wharf London

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Related Posts
Beginners guide to Photoshop Layers:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Not convinced of the need for Raw?

I often see on forums, people saying that they have shot both raw and jpg and can't see a difference. An additional comment, since Lightroom has entered the fray, is "Lightroom handles jpgs and raws..so why bother with raw?".

Over at The Luminous Landscape, Michael Richeman has produced a great example of the difference between the two formats when you actually do the same processing on them.

Here is a photo from my recent trip to the Lake District and yes it was captured in Raw:

Morning Mist
(Click to view large)