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Debunking The Old “raw vs. JPEG” Debate Forever
Note: Before bashing me, I have something to say. Raw shouldn’t be written in caps. It is not a format, is a file type. Like a text, a video or an image file, raw is just a generic category, with a lot of extensions like .ARW, .CR2, .DN, .NEF, .RAF and so on… You get the idea.
Besides the obvious difference between regular Point and Shoot cameras and DSLRs (the ability of interchanging lenses and exposing light manually), I knew that there was something else that made DSLR cameras more powerful, that thing was raw files. When I was starting to learn about photography, one photographer told me that DSLR cameras allow their users to capture images in raw files, and of course, I didn’t know what that was.
My first encounter with raw files was when I got my first DSLR camera, but I wasn’t aware of the power these files had back then, all I knew was that I could change white balance after taking the shot, and that was it. Basically a raw file is the equivalent of a negative from the film era. It is a crude file filled with information that allow photographers to develop pretty much everything that builds up an image. That sounds great, but why photographers bother with building the image after being downloaded to a computer if JPEG files already look great? Well, that’s why I want to talk today about the situations in which you should decide…
