• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

I thought I’d talk about this long debate about RAW vs. JPEG. It’s highly controversial and has been debated since the primordial mainstream adoption of RAW in photographers.

1. Erasers – People make mistakes it’s why we created erasers. I do my best to make my photos correct the first time.
2. White Balance – I no longer need to live in the tyranny of checking my white balance. Most of the time my auto white balance is on. However, if i wanted a warmer looking scene I can experiment with it.
3. Space – Space is no longer expensive. I can buy 500gb’s for around $100. I can shoot a lot of [tag]weddings[/tag] with that space and also buy a backup hard drive to mirror that information. This is true with compact flash cards as well. I can buy multiple 4gb cards for $40. Before they were $80-$100/card.
4. Workflow – This is a more personal reason. It may not apply to everyone else. With RAW, it makes it easier to batch color correct and correct the exposure. It’s all in Adobe’s Camera Raw converter: color, exposure, lens effects, white balance. Additionally, technological enhancements have made RAW processing very quick. Most files are ready to print once you’re done with the raw process.
5. Stops – I can correct my exposure with no image degradation or posterization. It becomes very noticeable if you have to correct a 1/2 – 1 stop in JPEG.
6. Lossless Compression – With JPEG, everytime I open a JPEG file it requires you to compress the file again when you close the file.
7. Multiple Exposures – I can grab multiple exposures from one properly exposed file and correct the tonality of the scene if I wanted to. This is especially important for me and my skies.
8. Color – With certain photos I’ll want to boost the saturation. Color is more easily manipulated with the white balance or HSL sliders. I can also be more creative with the way my photos are processed. I am given more freedom to play around with color.
9. Shutter speed – If i want critical sharpness in dark places with a long lens I can speed up my shutter and sacrifice exposure for sharpness if needed and avoid camera shake.
10. RAW – “raw” sounds better than “jaypeg”.

Final Thoughts

Like Jerry Springer,  I thought I’d throw out some final thoughts:

I think its extremely important for wedding photographers to shoot in raw so they have more creativity and freedom in a profession where the expectations great and time limitations are limited. Whereas commercial photographers work on one photo, wedding photographers have at most 1-5 minutes to work on one photo.