So here's a raw vs jpg hot take from someone who’s not engagement baiting, selling presets/instructional videos, pushing a YouTube channel, or any other nonsense. I’m just a dude who’s put a ton of shutter actuations on a lot of cameras over the past couple decades and I’m here to clear up some stuff.
I feel like I’ve run into a lot of nonsense online about raw vs jpg, people trying to sell you on how valuable editing is when shooting raw, what “straight out of the camera” means and what it has come to mean (often incorrect, more on that later) on and on…and it’s occurred to me that maybe instead of being my usual charming snarky self, I should explain it in case people are actually asking for real and are genuinely confused.
First, a couple operating principles:
1-Choosing raw or jpg doesn’t make you any more or less of a person with a camera. They both have uses. You are not automatically a rube if you shoot jpg, and you do not automatically qualify to sell instructional videos just bc you use raw. If I feel long-winded enough I’ll give you a couple of use cases where I’ve shot one or the other for very high-level clients.
2-I am mostly going to be correct here, but feel free to do your own googling. Right now, this minute, there is more freely available info for the new, curious photographer than at any other time in the entire history of photography. Go find some.
3-I use Capture One for my post processing. I find it to be superior in every way. Further, I have met a wide range of other professional photographers, and the vast majority of them also use it. These are all facts. Lightroom might work for you, which is also a fact. Final fact: I’ve never used Lightroom, so I can’t answer your question. Again…search engines, education. Feel free to use whatever you like, even your camera’s native raw processor. I don’t actually care and I’m not arguing here.
Ok, so: what is raw? What is jpg? Let’s start at the beginning.
Your camera records light. What it does with that light after it records it is really kind of the root of the entire discussion here. It’s actually very simple…images recorded in raw are the readout of what the sensor sees, without any sort of interpretation of it “cooked” into the file…nothing is permanent. If you shot in the wrong color temp, no problem. Under exposed? No biggie. When you shoot in raw, you are giving yourself the widest possible array of options with respect to exposure, maximum information in highlights and shadows, color temp, grading, everything. It has its limits, of course, but of all the ways to shoot it is the least limited.
Ok so that’s shooting in raw. Think of it as “raw output.” Now, when you shoot in jpg, different story. The advantage of jpg is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time in post finishing your images. The camera does it for you. This is what all your “picture modes” are about in your camera…you telling the camera how you want it to finish up your files for you. Is this great for the beginner? Sure, perhaps. It’s going to bang your pics into shape with minimal knowledge and effort.
The downside of jpg, however, especially for beginners, is that if and when you do mess up, whether you forget that you were set to manual, or you were shooting outside with an incandescent white balance, those settings are now permanently part of the file. You can tweak them a little bit and get something ok, but you’re much more limited with jpg than you are if you had messed up while shooting in raw.
Ok so those are the basics. Now we’re going to get into the weeds a little.
Let’s say you’re shooting in raw, you’re looking at the pics on the back of the screen, and you’re killing it. Everything looks amazing. You get back to the house, import all your photos, and…..nothing looks right. WTF?
So this actually throws off a lot of people, you’re not alone. We talked earlier about how raw is just that….raw data, just a lot of information from your sensor. It doesn’t look great like that. It’s flat, for one. It doesn’t pop. It might feel desaturated, or like the shadows are not as shadowy. So what your camera does, when you hit the view button, is treat it like a jpg. It shows you what it would look like if you were shooting in a mode that would allow the camera to process it. So already you’re not looking at what you captured, but your camera’s interpretation of what you captured.
Then you come home and load it into…Capture One, we’ll say, for the sake of this discussion. Capture One has a profile - for your camera, my cameras, and everyone’s camera - built in. Lightroom does as well. So now you take that same raw file, which looked one way on the back of your camera and now that it’s in Capture One, it looks different. What happened? You’re simply looking at two different interpretations of your image.
This is the absolute joy of a raw file…it’s endlessly changeable. So the fact that it’s flat and kind of dull and lifeless is a feature, not a bug. That file is designed to give you as much data at all levels of your image as possible so that you can let your imagination run wild in the middle of the night.
Incidentally, this is why people who tell you that their raw file “straight out of the camera” but run through C1 or LR are not quite getting it right…because those apps are doing some very basic work under the hood to dress up that raw file. Even with all the sliders set to zero, they’ve processed your image. Minimally, but it’s done. It’s also why anyone who tells you that “editing raw can take your pics to the next level” is a horse’s ass. Your raw files *have to* be edited. It’s like saying “cooking your chicken takes it to the next level,” when eating raw chicken will kill you. (I’m vegetarian btw, so I can say this).
If you want to see in Capture One what your basic raw file looks like straight out of the camera, go to the Color tab and change your curve to “Linear Response.” Crazy, right?
So how do you get your raw files to look like you want them to look? Well, I recommend taking sliders and moving them around. See what they do to the photo. C1 has some presets built in that are good starting points, or you can buy my preset package (kidding!)
Have questions? Hit me in the comments, DM me, use the contact form on my website.
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