Why I Shoot RAW
Or, “The Day JPEG Did Me Dirty”
One beautiful afternoon, I was on a hike with my family when I encountered some striking sunflowers standing tall in the middle of a meadow. I snapped a photo but wouldn’t realize until later that my photo was a bit overexposed and, worse, there was no way to fix it.
The blown out details in those petals?
Gone forever.
This is because I had my camera set to save images as JPEG instead of RAW.
Understanding Dynamic Range
To see how shooting in RAW could have saved my sunflower photo, we need to understand the concept of dynamic range: the span of light between the darkest shadows and brightest highlights.
The human eye has an incredible dynamic range, allowing us to see detail in both bright sunlight and deep shadows at the same time:
Camera sensors, however, have a much smaller dynamic range. This is a huge part of what makes “capturing what we see” so challenging. Our cameras literally can’t see what we see.
It gets worse: Standard image formats like JPEG (and any other format for presenting images on a screen) have even less dynamic range than the camera sensor. So your camera has to make some tough decisions about which parts of the sensor data it collected it should keep and what should be discarded. (However, you can help your camera out by learning to shoot in Manual mode or using exposure compensation.)
With that basic understanding of dynamic range, let’s look at what happens inside your camera when you snap a photo, and how shooting in RAW would have saved my sunflower photo.
When you press the shutter button, your camera isn’t just “taking a picture.” It’s gathering data by taking millions of tiny measurements of how much light hits each pixel on the sensor. But no matter how optimally your exposure is set, your sensor can’t capture all the light that our eyes see in our scene.
What happens next depends entirely on whether your camera will save the photo as JPEG or RAW.
Shooting in JPEG
If you’re shooting JPEG, your camera immediately does a bunch of guessing about how the sensor data should be processed: it adjusts contrast, boosts color, applies a tone curve, and then throws away the rest of the data that is outside the dynamic range of what JPEG can handle. (It actually gets worse still: by just the act of saving to JPEG, even more data is discarded simply to make the file size smaller.)
To summarize shooting JPEG, it incurs two rounds of dynamic range loss: First, dynamic range is lost because the sensor can't capture all the light in the scene. Then more dynamic range is lost because JPEG can't save everything the sensor captured:
If JPEG was a cake, it’s fully baked.
(Fyi, I'm expressing dynamic range here in terms of “stops,” the photography way of measuring light. Check out my Clicked! course to learn more about stops and exposure settings.)
My camera sensor almost certainly captured the details of those sunflower petals, but as soon as that sensor data was saved as a JPEG, those details were discarded and lost forever:
Shooting in RAW
If you’re shooting RAW, however, the camera stops at the “sensor capture” phase. It simply stores the sensor’s raw light measurements and says “you deal with it later.” That means you’ll need to open the file in a photo editing app that supports RAW files and do intentionally what your camera would have otherwise had to guess at.
Going back to the cake analogy, RAW is all the…well, raw ingredients waiting to be baked and seasoned to taste.
Having access to all of the data your camera’s sensor collects is most helpful for scenes that have a high dynamic range. These are scenes your eyes can process easily but your camera is going to struggle with.
The classic example of this is a sunrise or sunset scene where dark shadows are everywhere, but the sky is still gushing quite a bit of light. If you shoot RAW, you can decide later in an image editing app whether to expose for the shadows, the sky, or some compromise of the two:
…OR even better, you can nudge the shadows and the sky into the narrow dynamic range of JPEG and have it both ways. (This is standard functionality of any decent photo processing app.)
The RAW process ends with you saving the final JPEG exactly how you like it, not how your camera guessed the moment you snapped the photo.
The Trade-Offs
RAW files are big. They eat up 3 to 5 times more space than JPEG and require you to process them before they look “finished.” That’s why casual shooters or people who need to deliver photos instantly (like sports photographers) sometimes do stick with JPEG. But for anyone learning photography, or just wanting the best possible image quality, RAW is worth it in my opinion. You might be lured by the convenience of JPEG, but all it takes is one shot (like my sunflower photo) to see the value of shooting RAW.
In Short
Sometimes ease and convenience matter more than quality, and in those cases, there’s no shame in shooting JPEG. But know the trade-offs. If the situation calls for getting the most out of your camera, shoot RAW. You’ll have way more flexibility and all the original image data to fix exposure mistakes and get the best images possible from your camera.