Camera Hacker

Wiki

Older Revision of What can you do with RAW that you can t do with JPEG

Revision: 20140204_124525 | All Revisions


What can you do with RAW that you can't do with JPEG?

Shooting RAW take up so much space on your digital camera. And for most place--online and offline--JPEG is the de facto standard. So why shoot RAW? Why not just shoot JPEG?

One reason, JPEG is a lossy format, RAW is a lossless format. This topic is covered in our "Shoot JPEG or TIFF?" article and our "Shoot in RAW, Always!" article. So I won't go into details about it in this article.

In this article, I want to show you the power of RAW in real-life examples, rather than abstract theories. This way, you get a real taste of why you'd want to shoot RAW all the time--or, at least, both RAW and JPEG at the same time.

Comments & Discussion >>

Ove-Exposed Photos

RAW image contains everything that the digital camera sensor sees at the time you clicked the shutter button--the "raw" data. JPEG, on the other hand, is post-processed from the "raw" data. Therefore, once the JPEG image has been produced, the extra data in the RAW image are gone. So how can the extra "raw" data be useful? Let's take a look at an over-exposed example.

Comments & Discussion >>