Monthly Archive for April, 2008

1. JPEG, Unprocessed
2. JPEG, Auto Adjustments
3. RAW, Unprocessed
4. RAW, Auto Adjustments

I think these images from Epics Edit Weblog are another great expla­na­tion of why every­one should seri­ously con­sider shoot­ing in RAW rather then JPEG. Com­par­ing num­bers 1 & 2 with 3 & 4, one can see that the RAW files come out look­ing much more even and nat­ural, even before any user-directed changes. Once the cre­ative options of RAW are accounted for, it should be unde­ni­able that RAW is supe­rior to JPEG. It sim­ply offers more options, while pro­duc­ing a bet­ter image. Based on the above pho­tos, it is safe to assume that you should shoot in RAW when­ever pos­si­ble (and use a Nikon).

If, by chance, you don’t trust those eas­ily faked exam­ples (you can’t trust any­thing on the web these days), here is my tes­ti­mo­nial: In my hum­ble expe­ri­ence, RAW can make a world of dif­fer­ence. Some­times all it does is give you a bit more play in your cre­ative options; other times it’s a life saver, giv­ing you chance to use that shot you thought was lost. It’s the best for­mat out there for 99% of situations.

In essence, a RAW file is of intrin­si­cally higher qual­ity than a JPEG. It allows you to make major changes to an image after you’ve shot it and still retain good qual­ity. And in work­ing with RAW, you never mod­ify the orig­i­nal file. But — and this is a big but — that file requires two to ten times more stor­age space than a JPEG.

Yes, it’s a big­ger file, but hard dri­ves are cheap, really cheap. You paid $2000 on your cam­era, the least you can do is pony up a bit more for some extra mem­ory and hard drive space.

No mat­ter what your level of pho­tog­ra­pher you are, here are some of the rea­sons why you should use RAW:

Con­tinue read­ing ‘JPEG vs RAW: Which For­mat Do I Shoot In?’