Library module RAW vs JPG handling

[archbishop]

Lightroom Version Number

14.1.1

Operating System

1. macOS 15 Sequoia

Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III

I'm playing around with some photos I took a couple years ago. I was on a train through West Texas, so I had plenty of time to mess around with camera settings. I was messing around with in-camera settings, but I don't recall the specifics.

I see in Lightroom, some of the pictures look surprisingly different from what I expected. I was shooting Raw + JPG, and the JPG looks very different from the RAW. Here's thumbnails of both, as imported, with the JPG on the left:

I can develop the RAW to look more balanced (probably better than the JPG), but I'd like to learn more about what's going on here.

1. Lightroom does a pretty good job of hiding the JPG. The only way I was able to see it was to re-import it by itself. Is there a better way to reveal the JPG than to go back to the Finder?
2. Related to 1, the only way I knew that the JPG was going to be of interest was my memory. I may have made in-camera changes to other pictures. Is there a way to find out which ones without looking at every single pair?
3. I get the impression that there's no way to take the in-camera edits and apply them to raw, but is there a way to at least see the in-camera edits?
4. (This is probably more an EM5 question than a LR one.). I had HDR enabled in the camera, but it looks like it did all the stacking internally. Is there a way to see the originals? Is the RAW just one of the pictures the camera took? Or should I just use the bracketing feature on the camera instead, and combine in LR? (One surprising artifact of in-camera HDR is that the composition of the HDR and JPG are slightly different. The train was moving, and while it's hard to see in the thumbnails, in the Loupe view, it is clear the antennas in the background have moved. In other photos without HDR, the composition is identical.

Thanks!

 

[John R Ellis]

"Is there a better way to reveal the JPG than to go back to the Finder?"

Set the option Preferences > General > Treat JPEG Files Next To Raw Files As Separate Photos. All future imports will import the associated JPEGs as separate photos.

If you want JPEGs from existing raw+JPEG pairs in the catalog to appear separately, set the option and then right-click a folder of photos and do Synchronize Folder.

 

[clee01l]

The difference I see between the RAW and the JPEG files is that the JPEG has been developed using the tiny computer in the camera and the RAW image has only basic settings applied. It is up to you to use LrCs develop tools to properly expose the interior scene and not blow out the exterior view.
The JPEG has fixed the WB and exposure such that you can never get back to the RAW photosite values to correct

 

[archbishop]

Thank you both for your help. But, I am still not sure how to solve the problem I actually have.

I have many hundreds of photos. some small fraction of them have on-camera edits. I want to identify and process those JPG files separately, ideally without having to manually review each pair.

If I change import settings, then I will have many duplicate JPGs which are identical to their RAWs, which is not what I want.

I understand that for photos where I made in-camera edits, I'll have to re-edit them in LrC. I'm looking to narrow down the list of files which require me to do this extra work.

 

[John R Ellis]

Are you referring to, "I had HDR enabled in the camera, but it looks like it did all the stacking internally."? Or are your referring to other kinds of settings you applied in the camera?

Such settings are typically recorded in the manufacturer-proprietary MakerNotes metadata. If you share one or more JPEGs with the edits you're looking to find, I can probably tell you how to search for such photos using the Any Filter plugin. Upload the photo(s) to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar free service and post the sharing links here.

 

[archbishop]

In this particular photo, I had HDR enabled, but I believe I made other changes as well, such as boosting shadows. Thanks for the offer to help! Here's a link to the JPG:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/jesa...ey=geeledfz8g5e01ikr65mrh210&st=370phlcj&dl=0

 

[pedz]

Piecing together your replies with John's replies, here is my suggestion:

1. Turn on the option that John pointed out. I personally know nothing about this feature but have no hesitation following John's direction.
2. Pick your top most folder(s) and do "Synchronize" as John suggests. If you know for sure that the hidden JPEGs are only in a few places, then you can just do those folders.
3. Pick "All Photographs" in the far upper left corner (or the few folders you selected in the previous step) and then open the Filter bar with "\" if it isn't open (or View => Show Filter Bar). Open the Metadata tab in that bar.
4. In the first filter on the left, pick the top menu item which usually defaults to "Date" and select File Type. Then in the lower part, pick JPEG. Now you are viewing all the JPEGS in your catalog.
5. From here, you can narrow the number of JPEGS down by other criteria using the other filter panels that you are sure of. For example, the dates of the train trip might be a good place to start. Perhaps the particular camera might be another.

You should be able to narrow down the images displayed to a fairly accurate selection of just the JPEGs you are interested in. Then go through the images one by one doing whatever you want to do to them. You can also save the Filter that you created so you can go back to it later by selecting where it says "Custom Filter" in the right corner of the filter panel and then "Save Current Settings as New Preset..."

 

[archbishop]

I think I see the confusion here. I've been shooting RAW+JPEG. I have thousands of such pictures. For the vast majority of them, I made no changes in-camera, so the RAW and JPEG would be the same. For those, there's no reason to add the JPEG to the catalog. I'm interested in identifying the relatively small number where the JPEG is noticeably different, as in the thumbnails I posted above. Switching to include all the JPEGs in my catalog will just mean thousands of photos most of which are effectively duplicates.

 

[John R Ellis]

In this particular photo, I had HDR enabled, but I believe I made other changes as well, such as boosting shadows. Thanks for the offer to help! Here's a link to the JPG:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/jesa...ey=geeledfz8g5e01ikr65mrh210&st=370phlcj&dl=0

For that image, I used the Metadata Viewer plugin to look at the MakerNotes fields (marked in green), and I saw this:

which suggests that's where the camera stores whether in-camera HDR has been applied. I then used the Any Filter plugin's Filter command to find all photos that have the MakerNotes:StackedImage field set to HDR2:

It's a little tedious to scan through all of the MakerNotes for suspicious fields.