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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A lot of people have mentioned that jpeg is “lossy compression”. This means that there is a lot less information than in the raw image.
What other people have not mentioned yet is why jpeg looks so good _despite_ so much information being discarded.
Your eyes are pretty good, but they aren’t perfect. You will have experienced this when looking at something which is far away, like a mountain. You don’t feel like you are missing out on anything, but to see distant details you know that you will need binoculars.
What jpeg does is remove the information that you would only perceive in an image if you zoomed into it. If you don’t zoom in, you will not know it is missing.
If you are a professional photographer, you want this information (that you can’t normally see) because the processing you might want to do could bring that information into the perceptible range.
You can try it yourself. Take an image and save it as a JPEG with extreme compression, and then zoom into it. You will see the artefacts introduced by the lossy encoding.
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