RAW vs JPEG: Which Should You Be Using?
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Loading... - Martin Mutisya
- 22 Sep 2022
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Do you keep hearing photographers talking about shooting and editing RAW vs JPEG images? If you’re confused about what RAW is, and its benefits, then you’ll find all the answers you need right here. Sometimes called “digital negatives,” RAW images retain detail that other image formats discard, giving you the very best starting point for editing your images. In this article, you’ll discover the many wonderful benefits and applications of shooting in RAW vs JPEG.
RAW vs JPEG: What’s The Difference?
RAW is an image file format unique to each camera manufacturer. Essentially, it’s an exact copy of what your camera’s sensor captured when you pressed the shutter button. No post-processing is applied to the image before it is saved to your camera’s memory card.
Now, that might seem rather obvious, and you might expect all image file formats to accurately store what your camera’s sensor captured.
However, memory cards used to be much more expensive than they are now, and the maximum card capacity used to be quite small. Therefore, camera manufacturers had to use a more space-efficient image file format, so that more photos could be stored on the memory cards. That format was JPEG.
The JPEG format is extremely portable. Every photo editing package can work with JPEG image files, and most digital platforms, including email, web browsers, messaging services and even digital TVs, can display JPEG images without a problem.
Also, the JPEG format is very good at reducing file sizes but it does this by using compression techniques which throw away a lot of the detail and information in your photos. JPEG is an 8-bit technology, meaning that each combination of red, green and blue (RGB) pixel can be one of 16.8 million possible tones. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
But the RAW image format uses 14-bit technology, giving an incredible 4.4 trillion different possible tones per RGB pixel combination. This translates into a much wider dynamic range – both in relation to pixel brightness and pixel color.
Why Shoot In RAW?
A good visual example of the quality difference between a JPEG and RAW image of the same scene is a gradient in a sunset – where the dark sky at the top of the image gradually fades into the bright sunlight on the horizon.
We can’t show you a real RAW image because it’s not a suitable format for displaying on the web. But the two side-by-side images below are representative of the difference between a JPEG and RAW image, with a slight exaggeration to emphasize the difference for illustration purposes.
The image on the left (below) represents the JPEG image. The banding effect is due to the JPEG format not having enough different colors (between the blue at the top and the orange at the bottom) to create a continuous gradient. Read More…
