4 SHOULD YOU SHOOT IN RAW OR JPEG FORMAT?
We explain the differences between the two formats and why you should start shooting in raw if you don’t already
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the committee that created the now universally adopted and used image le format. On the other hand, ‘Raw’ isn’t an acronym – it literally means the ‘raw’ data straight from the camera’s sensor. Jpegs are processed by your camera as soon as you re the shutter and are compressed to make them smaller. Raw les generally look ‘worse’ straight out of the camera because they have minimal in-camera processing applied, so it’s up to you to add your own style and editing air at your computer afterwards, rather than leaving it to the camera to guess how you’d like your pictures to be processed.
One drawback to shooting raw les is their considerably larger size. This is because they hold lots more exposure information, which makes it much easier to correct colours or change adjustments such as white balance or exposure back at your computer or in software like Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. It’s much more dicult, if not impossible, to correct this with jpeg les if the data has been lost due to its compression. So if a sky has blown out in a jpeg, you won’t be able to pull back any detail (though you could do a full sky replacement instead).
With raw les, the added exposure information makes it much easier to tweak settings such as exposure or white balance in post-processing so the majority of professional photographers will shoot raw les for this reason.
However, there is a small group of professionals who require the immediacy of pre-edited jpeg les. This includes news or sports photographers who might need to get pictures from the event they are covering uploaded to a media outlet as soon as possible, where every second lost could give their competitors an edge.