The Advantages of Shooting in RAW

I've mentioned shooting in RAW several times in the book, but I haven't talked that much about it. RAW is an image quality mode, and most professionals today agree that RAW gives you two big advantages over the JPEG-quality images: (1) it provides the highest possible image quality because the photos are not compressed (JPEG files are compressed to a smaller file size by throwing away some of the original data), and (2) the images are just as they were captured by your camera's sensors, and no in-camera processing is done (when you shoot JPEGs your camera actually does some color correction, sharpening, etc., to make the JPEGs look good). When you shoot in RAW, your camera doesn't do any of this automatic correctionyou get to do it yourself (including making white balance, exposure, shadow, and other decisions after the shot has been taken) either in Adobe Photoshop or in your camera manufacturer's RAW processing software. Pros love the control this gives them because they can process (and experiment with) RAW images themselves, and best of all they never damage the original (the RAW digital negative).

The Downside of Shooting in RAW

There are really only two: (1) RAW files are larger in size, so you'll fit about 1/3 fewer photos on your memory card, and (2) since RAW files are much larger in file size, it takes longer to do any editing with them in Photoshop.