Photography: Raw vs. Jpeg

As a photographer myself and having once been an amateur as well, I learned a great deal about photography. Not only did I learn about all the manual settings, but I also learned the difference between RAW vs. JPEG. The difference is the quality in which your pictures turn out. If you take a look at your jpeg file, you may think to yourself, "The quality looks fine, I have no reason to shoot in raw!". You are wrong. You have several reasons.

The number one reason to shoot in raw is because no matter how many times you edit it and save it as it's RAW format, it can also be reset; everything you did to it can be undone. You can't do that with jpeg file format.

Let's say you do a wedding and all those shots are in Jpeg, then you go to edit them in say, Picasa or Photoshop. One thing is going to happen here. That thing, is, that all of the images you edit, like:

• Color correct
• Crop
• black and white
• adding frames

All of that above and anything else you do to that image is going to cause you to lose some major quality. Sure, you can undo what you did to it and save it as another file, but congratulations, you just lost quality no matter what. See, if you had shot that wedding in Raw, edited that image in a raw editor and then saved it as either a tiff or jpeg-you could have printed some really great quality images.

Now! Like I said above, if you had shot in raw you wouldn't have lost quality. A raw format requires a raw editor to work with images and best of all its destruction free. Which means, all those pixels your camera takes, for example, 10.2mp, you can shoot with all of it. A jpeg doesn't contain as many pixels and the file sizes are greatly apart.

You can shoot a large jpeg photo and have the file size be 5MB, but if you shoot with raw that file size is well over 10MB. Imagine all the quality lost in that jpeg. All the more reasons to start shooting in raw!

I realize that by shooting in raw, that also means a LOT more editing of your images, but in the end it pays off because the client is happy about how great their images look hanging on their wall or in a photo album.

One last thing before I end this article - If you are not comfortable shooting completely in raw, then if you camera offers it, choose the setting to shoot in both RAW and JPEG, that way your camera saves a raw version and a jpeg version (which you could end up using as a proof image on the web) And save the raw for printing.

That way, you get time to learn how to edit a raw file, use a raw editor and learn how to save the file in tiff and prepare it for printing.  Do whatever you want with that Jpeg though!