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 images = what your camera sensor sees, normal images = what your screen shows.
There are a few differences: A sensor doesn’t really record colored pixels. Color is achieved by placing a filter in front of it – so some pixels will record only red light, some only green and some only blue. While your monitor does works in a similar way, generally there those “subpixels” are grouped together to full-color pixel units. This translation has to be done before an image can be shown.
And there are other things that have to be done in between the sensor recoding an image and a monitor displaying it. A camera would typically remove image noise, correct white balance (basically, remove any tinting that the lighting of your scene might have), and a lot of other different things. RAW images don’t include all of that and are taken directly from the sensor data, including more details about some over- or underexposed areas, that would just appear “completely black” or “completely white” in a processed image.
That means that RAW images aren’t really “better”, in fact they themselves are much worse pictures than a processed JPEG. They just allow you the freedom of doing those processing steps yourself (and adjusting the parameters to your liking) to get an even better end result – assuming you and your software are more capable than your camera (which might make some wrong guesses about how you want your photo to look).
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