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 raw photo is like a raw cooking ingredient: it isn’t enjoyable as it is, but it can become infinite kinds of other, more enjoyable things if you cook it properly.
* If you’re a pro chef, you will prefer raw ingredients because you have the skill and patience to turn them into something nice. This means more effort is required, but you get to make the meal exactly the way you like.
* If you’re a consumer, you just want to eat something nice without much effort. So you’ll prefer the ingredients to be cooked and prepared for you. This means you can’t choose how exactly the ingredients will be prepared, but you don’t mind.
* However, if as a consumer, you are given a cooked, prepared meal and want to alter it, you will find that pretty difficult because you can’t “uncook” it.
In technical terms, this means that a raw photo is unprocessed, it contains all the data that came out of the sensor. Like a block of marble before being sculpted. Once you process it, you remove information to shape it to your liking, like sculpting and carving the marble. It gets improved in the process, but it can also get ruined, and once these decisions are made, there’s no going back (you can’t turn a black and white JPEG back into a color photo).
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