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
As others have said, RAW files are a full record of what the sensor detected. The RAW files themselves are hardly ever edited, but images to be displayed or printed will be generated from the data in the RAW files and saved in some other format (such as JPEG). The process of generating the display image from the RAW data will include various manipulations (such as sharpening, noise reduction, contrast enhancement, colour balance and additional compression).
If you shoot RAW only, you’ll have to use special software to open the RAW file, apply the required enhancements and save the image to JPEG (or some other format) afterwards. If you shoot JPEG only, the process is basically the same, except it all happens in the camera using the camera settings you’ve selected; the RAW image file is not saved. This means that the settings that were applied to the RAW data are cooked into the JPEG and can’t be undone or changed later (at least not perfectly).
The vast majority of people who express an opinion online about this stuff will say you should shoot RAW. I’ll offer a contrary view: I think for many purposes the advantages are theoretical rather than practical. I used to shoot exclusively RAW on Nikon cameras, but when I switched to Fuji (and now also Ricoh) cameras, I struggled to produce images from the RAW files that looked as good as the out-of-camera JPEGs. I now hardly ever shoot RAW.
It’s perfectly possible to follow a workflow using an out-of-camera JPEG as the master image, where this master JPEG is kept safe and is never edited; all working edits are based on that master JPEG. It doesn’t matter how many further edits are made; the edits are always generated from the master, so there’s no additional degradation with further edits. (I follow such a “non-destructive” workflow in Adobe Lightroom using the out-of-camera JPEGs instead of the RAW files.)
For some images, such as charts and logos, even a modest amount of (lossy) compression can lead to visible compression artifacts, so JPEG is not a suitable format for this sort of image. But for photographs of normal subjects, modest levels of compression in the final JPEG will generate artifacts that are simply not detectable by eye. There are other theoretical advantages of RAW images, such as increased bit-depth leading to greater latitude in editing areas of similar tone before banding occurs. But in practice, I’ve rarely found any of these potential advantages to provide any real-world benefit and I have no plans to go back to shooting RAW. (As I mentioned, this is not a view you’ll see expressed online very often.)
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