Dslr why shoot in raw

Obviously you want to get the best exposure in camera, but sometimes things move fast especially with weddings! Great white balance and colour are essential to an awesome image, and shooting RAW lets you make the adjustments easier and faster, with better results. When you shoot RAW you have access to sharpening and noise algorithms in a program like Lightroom that are way more powerful than those found in your camera.

The awesomness of this is that you never ever have to worry about ruining an image, accidentally saving over, or being unable to go back and make changes. JPEG files lose quality every time you open them, make adjustments, and save again.

True story. Even though more and more people are shooting digital, great prints are as important as ever maybe even more so, due to their relative rarity! With RAW you can choose from any colour space when you are exporting it out, so you can adjust depending on the situation! Is the image going on to the web? Then output in the sRGB colour space to ensure maximum compatibility among web browsers.

Basically there are different colour spaces that work best for different situations, and when you shoot RAW you can export a single image in multiple spaces! In order to take full advantage of all the benefits of Lightroom and Aperture you should be shooting RAW! Professionals should be providing their clients with the highest quality possible. Achieving proper colour balance, and choosing the right colour space for the situation are critical as well. By shooting RAW you take control, and are able to manage these problems to create the best results possible.

Now that some point and shoots are capable of shooting RAW, hobbyists and amateurs can also take advantage of this pro level option, and get better files and prints!

Good deal. However, most photographers do some level of processing to their JPEGs so already the argument is getting flimsy. Then, when you add in the fact that adjustments like white balancing, and recovering highlights and shadows are way faster with RAW files, and it actually begins to looks like processing RAW can be faster than JPEG!!

This is definitely a concern for many shooters, especially those who create a lot of images. Memory cards are the same deal. The camera will still shoot the same frames per second, regardless of whether it is RAW or JPEG, but you may have to wait for the camera to write to the memory card if the buffer fills up.

If shooting fast sequences if critical for you, and you want to shoot RAW, you can purchase faster memory cards, or a more expensive camera with a larger buffer. Companies like Adobe either need to license software to decode the RAW files or reverse engineer how the files should be converted. For important shoots, I generally shoot RAW in case I need to make major adjustments to the photo afterwards. As an example, on a recent trip to Botswana, I was photographing some birds against a backlit sky when we were startled by an elephant that came out of the bushes not 15 feet from our truck.

As you can imagine when I finally reviewed my images a few minutes later I realized what I had done but it was too late to go back and recreate that moment. If I had shot this as a JPEG, this is the furthest I could have pushed the file because of the smaller dynamic range when editing the file. Notice that the color, contrast and saturation in the entire photo is quite low, and it leaves the photo lacking the punch that you would expect and hope from this amazing subject.

You really start to get a sense of how much more dynamic range is available in a RAW file when you look at the edited RAW image. Not always, no. Conversely, if you only ever shoot RAW, think back and see if you really need to edit every single photo. Either way, try and think outside of what you normally do and try something new with your camera. By clicking Sign Up, you are opting to receive educational and promotional emails from Nikon Inc.

You can update your preferences or unsubscribe any time. Search Articles. Featuring Chris Ogonek. Glossary Off On. This makes it very easy to share but it also comes with some downsides: Much of the information encoded in a JPEG is baked-in, meaning that any edits done to the file are destructive and there will be a slight loss in quality. The original photo was mistakenly heavily overexposed. More Like This More articles like this.

They ought to be with all the extra information packed inside them. Along with image specific information, camera-specific and manufacturer-specific information is also saved within a RAW image.

Secondly, RAW images cannot be directly viewed; they need conversion to some other image format to be seen normally. This makes working with them an inconvenience. The majority of us are familiar with JPEGs. Along with being the default image format in most point and shoot cameras , JPEG images are the most easily exchanged images via email and direct USB transfer. A JPEG can be seen as a versatile bundle with the capability to exhibit million of colors within a very compressed file size.

When an image is saved in JPEG format, the camera takes care of all settings like sharpness, white balance correction etc. You do not need to bother yourself with post-processing. Just click it and share it. Being small in size means that some of the image information is stripped off. The more detailed an image is, the larger it will be in size and vice-versa. That means you may never know what effects were applied on the image and would never have the chance to reverse them if you want.

Don't be. It's only you who can decide which format to choose. Weigh the above reasons and situations carefully before picking on a picture format. If you've always thought all picture formats are similar and saving an image in one format is equal to the other, well think again!