• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1763 0

back, digital SLR, or an advanced compact digital camera, you will almost certainly have the capability to shoot using the camera's raw format mode. The advantages of shooting raw as opposed to JPEG mode are not always well understood. If you shoot using JPEG, the files are compressed by varying amounts and this file compression enables you to fit more captures on to a single card. Some photographers assume that shooting in raw mode simply provides you with uncompressed images without JPEG artifacts, but there are some more important reasons why capturing in raw mode is better than shooting with JPEG. The main benefit is the flexibility this gives you. The raw file is like a digital negative, waiting to be interpreted any way you like. It does not matter about the color space or white balance setting that was used at the time of capture, since these can all be set later in the raw processing. You can also liken capturing in raw mode to shooting with negative film, since when you shoot raw you are recording a master file that contains all the color information that was captured at the time of shooting. To carry the analogy further, shooting in JPEG mode is like taking your film to a high street photo lab, throwing away the negatives and then making scans from the prints. If you shoot JPEGs, the camera is deciding automatically at the time of shooting how to set the white balance and tonal corrections, often clipping the highlights and shadow detail in the process. In fact, the camera histogram you see on the camera LCD is based on the JPEG interpretation capture data regardless of whether you are shooting in raw or JPEG mode (see Figure 3.3 ).

Figure 3.3 The camera's on-board processor is used to generate the low resolution JPEG preview image that appears in the LCD screen. The histogram is also based on the JPEG preview and is therefore a poor indicator of the true exposure potential of a raw capture image.

When shooting raw, all you need to consider is the ISO setting and camera exposure. But this advantage can also be seen by some to be its biggest drawback: since the Camera Raw stage adds to the overall image processing, this means more time has to be spent working on the images, plus there will be an increase in the capture file size and download times. For these reasons, news photographers and others will find that JPEG capture is preferable for such work.

It's ‘raw’ not ‘RAW’

This is a pedantic point, but raw is always spelt using lower case letters and never all capitals, which would suggest that ‘raw’ was some sort of acronym, like JPEG or TIFF, which it isn't.

JPEG capture

When you shoot in JPEG mode, your options are more limited since the camera's on-board computer makes its own automated decisions about how to optimize for tone, color, noise and sharpness. When you shoot using JPEG or TIFF, the camera is immediately discarding up to 88% of the image information that's been captured by the sensor. This is not as alarming as it sounds, because as you'll know from experience, you don't always get a bad photograph from a JPEG capture. But consider the alternative of what happens if you shoot using raw mode. The raw file is saved to the memory card without being altered by the camera. This allows you to work with all 100% of the image data that was captured by the sensor. If you choose to shoot in JPEG capture mode you have to make sure that the camera settings are absolutely correct for things like white balance and exposure. There is some room for manoeuvre when editing JPEGs, but not as much as you get when editing raw files. In JPEG mode, your camera will be able to fit more captures onto a card, and this will depend obviously on the capture file size and compression settings used. However, it is worth noting that at the highest quality setting, JPEG capture files are sometimes not that much smaller than those stored using the native raw format. What you will find is that the length of the burst capture rate is greater when shooting in JPEG mode and for some photographers, such as those who