Garry Black Photography

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Shoot in RAW or JPEG?

In the original draft of this article I had lots of technical information as to why Raw is so much better than shooting in jpeg. Then I realized that seeing the actual difference is probably the best proof. The first set of pictures were shot in raw, the picture on the left is the unaltered version, it's also pretty close to what it would have probably looked like if it had been shot in jpeg. The one on the right has been processed in Adobe camera raw and further enhanced in Photoshop.

The bottom set of photos were shot in jpeg (not Raw), again the one on the left is what came out of the camera without any processing. And the one on the right was the best that I could do enhancing it with Photoshop and Topaz adjust. While it has been improved quite a bit, it is no where as good as the one shot in raw. I could have probably improved on it some more with additional work, but for both sets of images I spent about an equal amount of time.

 

This is what the picture looked like on the LCD screen of the camera. It's also pretty close to what it would look like had I shot it in jpeg. See the image below which was shot in jpeg.

This is what it looked like when I had finishing processing and adjusting it in Photoshop.

 

 

 

 

Yanick (from the Spring 2009 workshop) provided this photo that he had shot in jpeg, it was taken the same time (15 minutes earlier) as the other ones above.

 

Now should you shoot in jpeg or raw?  If you don't plan on doing any post processing of your images, then jpeg is the easiest solution, it does save you time and space (memory cards and hard disk) but at the expense of quality and flexibility. A raw file is like a negative, you can interpret the image in as many ways as you'd like.The difference between jpeg and raw is really a choice between convenience and quality. And exactly how much quality do you need, depends on what you want to do with the pictures.

 

 

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