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When you press the shutter release on your camera, the shutter quickly opens exposing the sensor to light. The light that hits the sensor is then turned into raw data. When you shoot JPEG, that raw data gets processed by camera into a finished photograph. The problem with this method is that you are leaving all of the decision making and creativity up to the camera. Think of your photograph as a cake. You have your ingredients, eggs, flour, sugar, butter, milk, etc. You can change those ingredients all around to easily create all sorts of different types of cakes. But once you bake the cake, it is a lot harder to go back and change the flavor. Think of a RAW picture as the basic ingredients of your photo. When you are shooting in JPEG mode, the camera “bakes” all those raw ingredients into a final JPEG file. It is much harder to go back and change things like the white balance or recover shadow once the camera creates a JPEG image. The Benefits of shooting RAW: There are many reasons why you should be shooting raw. Because you are dealing with the raw data directly from the camera sensor, you have more power to control that data and push it to its limits. White Balance: When you shoot raw, you have the ability to control the white balance after the fact. You can easily increase or decrease the temperature to make the photo more accurate to the original scene. If you are leaving the decision making up to the camera, it may decide on a white balance that will create odd color casts on the photo resulting in a overly blue, green, or orange photograph. The human eye is much more capable of deciding what true white light should look like. Noise Control: When shooting JPEG, your camera automatically applies noise reduction to the photo. This automatic noise reduction can reduce sharpness and detail in the photo. When you shoot raw, you can apply the noise reduction yourself with better control during post processing using Photoshop, Lightroom, or other software. This allows you to maintain detail and sharpness in the finished photo. Dynamic Range: Raw better preserves the details in the shadows and highlights of the photograph. During post processing, you can adjust the exposure, or Dodge (lighten) and Burn (darken) specific areas of the photo without losing detail. When you shoot JPEG, you have less information in those dark and light areas of the photo, and when you try to dodge and burn those areas, there is no data there to pull from. You quickly run out of wiggle room when editing the photo. The Cons of shooting RAW: There are downsides to shooting raw. Raw files are much larger than JPEGs. Raw files can easily be several times as large as JPEGs. But with memory cards and hard drives becoming increasingly less expensive and higher capacity, file size is quickly becoming a non issue. But with the larger files sizes, the write speed of the memory cards is still an issue. When you are quickly shooting a burst of photos to capture action, your camera can fill up its buffer in no time. The buffer is where the camera temporarily stores the photos in memory while it waits to record them to the memory cards. A faster memory card clears the buffer quicker. This buffer is only so large, and the raw files can fill the buffer fast. Once the buffer is full, the camera does not allow you to shoot anymore photos until there is room in the buffer. You may miss a shot because of this. But because JPEGs are much smaller, they not only write to the memory card faster, It takes more JPEGs to fill the buffer. This is one of the reasons sports photographers may choose to shoot JPEG instead of raw. Another downside to shooting raw is that all your photos will need to be processed in some way. When you first import your raw photos into Lightroom, they will all look dull and soft. You may need to adjust the contrast, color saturation, and sharpening to all your photos before you are finished. Once you have done that, you will then need to export the processed photo to a standard format such as JPEG. Now you can share, and post it for the world to see. Raw files are also a proprietary format. This means that possibly in the future, you may not be able edit your raw files anymore. Your editing software has to be able to support your specific raw format. When a new camera is released, it often takes a little bit of time for support to be added to your editing software. For example, when the Canon 7D Mark II was released, it took Adobe a little bit of time to release a software update for Lightroom for you to be able to edit the raw files from the new camera. Possibly in the distant future, there will not be any added support for your raw files you shot with an old camera. For this very reason, there is an open source standard that you can convert your raw files to in order to always have support for your photos. This standard is called Adobe DNG (Digital Negative). You can find out more about DNG here The Benefits of Shooting JPEG There are times when it makes sense to shoot JPEG. If you are are a sports photographer, or photojournalist, Besides not missing a shot because your cameras buffer is full, you often will need to get your photos uploaded quickly to your editor so they can publish the news as soon as possible. Not having to process the photos allows you to get them delivered fast. The same goes if you are at a party, or out with friends and you just shooting snapshots, you may not want to have to process every photograph before getting them posted to a social network or sent to friends. Most people will not know the difference anyway. You are saving yourself a whole lot of work and time. If your camera supports it, you can also choose to shoot both RAW and JPEG (RAW + JPEG) at the same time. Both formats will be recorded to your memory card simultaneously. This way, you can use the JPEG when you need a photo quickly or without editing, but when you need to do some heavy editing of a specific photo, the raw file will be available. Another choice is to shoot raw, and extract a JPEG preview that is embedded inside the raw file using 3rd party software. When you shoot a raw file and the image appears on the LCD screen of your camera, a JPEG preview is what is being displayed. Not the raw file itself. You can extract that JPEG from the RAW file when needed. Don’t let anybody tell you that one format is better than the other. Only you can make that decision. It all depends on the subject matter and personal preference. This article is to help you make an informed decision on which is best for you.

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