Should i take pictures in raw

Shooting in RAW vs. JPEG may make sense if you tend to overexpose or underexpose an image. Though the ease of a processed JPEG is nice, your brain is often more sophisticated than your camera and working in the RAW format gives you full artistic control. Settings like white balance, exposure, and brightness can all be changed in post with a few clicks of your mouse in a program like Photoshop or Lightroom. If you accidentally use the wrong setting for an image, change it in Photoshop by adjusting the RAW file, and no one or client has to be the wiser.

You can also use sharpening tools in Photoshop or Lightroom that are more powerful than the tools in your camera. An image that was shot too soft or has too much noise is easily sharpened up with these tools, resulting in photos that look truly awesome shared in your photography website.

Nervous about editing RAW files? The beauty of editing RAW files is that it is non-destructive. When you open a RAW image vs. This way, you can always access the RAW file, or raw data, at any time, then re-edit or adjust as needed, without losing the high quality of the file.

This makes the editing process less stressful, and gives you the option of editing the same RAW file differently, depending on your intent and the needs of your client. Collecting all the data your camera can see takes up a significant amount of space. Because RAW files are not compressed, they take up more memory on your camera.

Shooting in RAW also requires more storage on your computer, with larger harddrives and better computer specs, as processing RAW files can be more resource intensive on your computer. This may be costly for some photographers, as computer storage, graphic and RAM updates can add up.

RAW vs. But processing an image yourself does take a significant amount of time, especially if you are working image by image and are new to photo editing.

Shooting RAW vs. JPEG means you will have to set aside time after a project to upload the images to editing software and tweak them so they look their best. Image processing can be especially stressful if you are working up against a tight deadline for a client.

If you do go with the RAW format for big projects, it could be helpful to create a workflow using Google Apps or other organizing programs that makes it easier for you to process all of your photographs on time.

Some photographers are turned off by the time-consuming nature of processing RAW files into beautiful, finished images. Although the more you edit your own images, the faster your process becomes!

Always check that the software you are using to open and edit RAW files is designed by the same manufacturer as your digital camera, i. If you have a newer digital camera, you may need to wait a bit for software companies to update their software so you can open RAW files using their platform.

Many camera manufacturers are starting to offer an option to shoot in DNG format, and soon this open-source format will likely be the go-to for all manufacturers moving forward, making it that much easier for you to access your RAW files. Two options. Two sets of pros and cons. JPEGs are your BFF if you are taking photos casually or on the fly say, at a family gathering or a party with friends.

JPEGs give you the flexibility to take a lot of images quickly and share them right away, no extra processing time required. You may even opt for JPEGs if you are shooting a ton of images in a fast-paced environment like a sports game or a fashion show, and you feel confident enough to know your exposure, letting your camera do the rest of the work for you.

The RAW format is ideal if you are shooting with the intent of editing the images later. Shots where you are trying to capture a lot of detail or color, and images where you want to tweak light and shadow, should be shot in RAW. Go for RAW if you are shooting photos for your photography portfolio that you want to spend a lot of time on, adjusting the white balance, color, and tone until they are just right. RAW may also be ideal for high-fashion, commercial, and creative work where you want the images to have a uniform vision or style that pops with the help of tools in Photoshop or Lightroom.

There are numerous raw file formats, and your particular format depends on the type of camera you are using. When you shoot an image with your digital camera, a lot of things happen very quickly. Your image sensor is exposed to light, which results in the surface of the sensor having a unique electrical charge for each pixel on the sensor. These charges are read from the sensor and assigned a number that is, they are digitized , which corresponds to how much light hit each pixel.

If you are shooting in raw mode, these numbers are immediately written to the memory card as is. If you are shooting in JPEG mode, there are a few more steps the image goes through in-camera. The resulting color image is then adjusted in various ways, including being white balanced to compensate for the type of light you were shooting in. Since a raw image is not converted into a color image, processed, or compressed, it is truly, raw data. To turn that raw data into a usable image, it still has to go through all those processes that your camera employs when you shoot in JPEG mode, but these steps are performed by your computer, using raw converter software, such as Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, Photoshop Camera Raw, and others.

There are many advantages to shooting raw, from making edits that are impossible with JPEG images, to the ability to easily alter white balance. With a raw file, you can change the white balance of an image after the fact. With raw, this is never a concern. 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.

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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. Article Collections.