I’ve listened to many tech reviewers and photo editors saying that RAW images are better and have been intrigued by it. Also what are it’s merits and demerits?
In: Technology
RAW is just that, raw data, it’s all of the data that the camera captures – it’s a lot so the files are huge. So the cameras will convert them into JPGs using some serious compression and it does this by throwing away 70-90% of that data.
For point and shoots it’s not too much of an issue, but when you process photos digitally you want all of the data to play with.
For example, a photo of the night sky in RAW might have 100,000 tones of black, but in JPG it might be 20,000.
The JPG will show a black sky, but using software like Adobe Lightroom, you can make adjustments to show all of the stars and galaxy in the RAW version
When you’re editing you can tweak the levels to bring out all of the extra detail in the shadows, highlights and colours. With JPG you can’t do that because the data simply isn’t there
RAW is always better to shoot if you can and you want to process your photos to the best of their ability
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