A beginner's guide to picking between RAW and JPEG file formats when shooting digital photos.
We all have been there at some point in our photographic journeys: Our cameras, set to AUTO, pointing and clicking, saving JPEG images that we perhaps edit a little and put in an album to archive. Maybe we throw on an Instagram filter to fancy it up for social media. Then we forget about these images for a while.
The same is true for JPEG images. This is not to say nobody should shoot in JPEG format. On the contrary, JPEG photos are extremely convenient. The processing is done in camera for you, and the image is easy to share quickly with a smaller file size to boot. But on the off chance that you ever need to tweak an image later, and barring certain specific situations, you will soon learn that RAW is the way to go. So, what makes RAW so much more flexible?This is numero uno.
For the sake of this illustration, let’s say you shot the image in JPEG. As you adjust your sliders to reduce exposure or highlights, you will notice that many parts of the highlights remain white. Checking the histogram, you might find that there is a tall spike on its right-hand side, indicating remaining blown highlights. That means that with the limited data in the JPEG file, you simply won’t be able to recover the data in that part of the image. It will remain a bright white forever.
Above, we adjusted the exposure to make sure the lightest parts were not too light and darkest parts not too dark. You also end up wanting to adjust contrast, whites, and blacks. When you do this to a JPEG image, crazy things start happening. Normal skin tones turn orange/yellow. Those landscape blues and greens start looking a bit fake and overprocessed. Color noise becomes apparent. There is simply not enough information for you to be as flexible in editing your image.
For this reason, RAW files are the better option for photographers who want to ensure that they can reprocess a photo years later after their skills, tastes, and technologies change.So far, RAW has trumped JPEG in many important categories, but JPEG does have its own strengths. One of the primary ones is the speed at which you can capture photos.
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