
In today's otherwise short blogpost I want to discuss shooting in RAW vs shooting in JPEG. This is quite a subject of debate amongst photographers and I'd like to present my perspective on the issue. Of course, you can choose to disagree and that's the joy of talking about photography. So let's begin.
If you own a decent camera, you need to shoot in RAW

RAW formats are your digital negatives
Did any people you knew from the film generation have a deep interest in photography? You might remember the days of the 30mm, 36 shot film. If you remember, you'd get a film negative at the start of the development process. After that it was a lot of magic in the darkroom. People would then play with different chemicals and techniques to enhance the default negative image to produce masterpieces like the ones the great Henri Cartier Bresson created. Now granted, that Bresson himself wasn't great at cropping and processing film - he generally outsourced the activity to give himself more time to shoot. That being said, all his shots did actually go through a post process.The problem with the digital era is the fact that you can produce pictures for sharing right out of your camera - the JPEG format. That's a problem because you aren't really giving your pictures the tender loving care that they need - the little extra zing before you actually share. So what's wrong with a JPEG - after all, you can use Photoshop to enhance your JPEGs and even tools like iPhoto and Picasa give you some tools out of the box. The problem is that the JPEG file is just a snapshot of a moment in time - nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't capture any information about the light available for you to be able to make changes to the exposure of the scene or the colours without actually deteriorating the quality of your image. So each change that you make from the time that you start editing your JPEG file results in some loss in quality.
On the other hand, the RAW file is an information heavy format. It's a proprietary format that changes from manufacturer to manufacturer. In addition to the snapshot that the JPEG also captures, the RAW file captures a lot of information about the light in the scene. While the camera does a little bit of work on your JPEG file by increasing the saturation and vibrance and adding a little bit of sharpness to your shot, the RAW file usually looks pretty drab out of the box. However, you get the opportunity to make a number of tweaks to the vibrance, saturation, sharpness and exposure of the scene without dramatically reducing the quality of the shot. Nice huh?
Do remember though that all this flexibility comes at a cost. RAW files are pretty huge and fill up your memory cards and hard-drives quite fast!
A few minutes of love
That's all your images need really. Take a look at the above video. It takes me less than four minutes to rescue what you could call a hopeless picture to start with. Most pictures aren't going to be such a hopeless job and all you're going to need is few little tweaks that don't take away the detail in your image. RAW files help you do just that.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and give you a bit of a build up to my talks at the Learning Solutions Conference 2012. I'm still undecided on the exact stuff I want to put up on the blog, so let me play it by ear for now. But let's see how this goes - keep reading and thanks for the encouragement.
© Sumeet Moghe
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