What exactly is happening to a Raw photo when it becomes a JPEG and what about Raw photos are so preferable for photo editing
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Others have explained JPEG is a compression technique. Here’s my ELI5 attempt to explain compression in general:
Let’s say you have an image made up of 8 pixels. Left to right the pixels are:
“Bright red, black, black, dark grey, darker grey, black, dark grey, red.”
That’s the “raw” format: each pixel gets an exact color value. But, it takes up a lot of space since we have to list the exact color for every pixel.
We could compress this by converting it to:
“Bright red, 2 black, dark grey, darker grey, black, dark grey, red.”
This is called “lossless” compression because we’ve shortened it slightly, but no information was lost. But, shades of dark grey and black are pretty close. If we wanted to shorten it more, we could do:
“Bright red, 6 black, red.”
This is a lot shorter, but we’ve lost some detail. Instead of seeing the subtle variations in the dark colors, it’s all just black now. This is called “lossy” compression. JPEG is a type of lossy compression.
You can see that JPEG is fine for most situations, but if you want to edit a photo, you’re better off starting with the version that has all of the information and detail.
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