RAW or JPEG? This is the ethernal dilemma of digital photographers. Let make some clarity about these two formats. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, a compressed format particularly suitable for web publishing or emailing or other digital uses. If you want print your photos or post-processing them, than choose the RAW way. RAW is not an acronym, but it's a format that is not compressed and offers you several more possibilities to elaborate your pictures in the digital darkroom process. RAW is everything that the sensor of your camera sees at the moment of the shot. Instead of JPEG picture, which are compressed via the internal processor of the camera, the RAW images are exactly what sees the sensor, which is nearly what your eyes see.
I personally use JPEG quality if I have to shoot only for fun: if I don't want to lose so much time in front of my computer, I choose immediately JPEG. Instead, if I want to create particular images (HDRs or other things) I prefer the RAW way: using various type of software (like Canon Digital Photo Professional or Adobe Photoshop) I can modify easily several parameters like sharpness, contrast, saturation, white balancing, picture styles, RGB channels and many others. For digital elaboration purpose the RAW format is the best choice, I think.
But, if you want to use JPEG format also for post-production, you can do this thing: I've said that this format is compressed, so when elaborating a JPEG image, the result is a new JPEG image with a loss of information. To avoid this, the first time that you open the JPEG image with a photo editing software, you save it as a TIFF image. Then, you can proceed to elaborate the TIFF file without any loss of detail and information.
There is also another difference between the two formats: JPEG mode easily handles low contrast scenes, while RAW images handle wide-contrast scenes and highlights better than JPEG images. That is, RAW format has a bit more tolerance in the highlight areas of a scene, so one has a better chance of not getting overexposed images. Hence, when you take a picture, look carefully at the contrast range of the scene: the higher the contrast, the more you should consider shooting in RAW mode.
However, if your purpose is to take consecutive frames in order to capture an action (like in sport photography), you should consider the dimension of image files. In the best quality, JPEG images occupy 3 Mb, while RAW pictures about 8 Mb. So it will take more time to your camera to save RAW images in the memory card than JPEGs. Therefore, if you want to capture a high speed action sequence, choose the JPEG format.
These are my advices, but there is another way you can go through: if your camera has the function of shooting both in RAW and JPEG (sometimes called RAW + JPEG), than choose this. For every frame you will have a JPEG file and a RAW file, so you can decide what do you want to do with these.
Personally, I use RAW mode when I have to make impressive shots and JPEG mode if I want to take pictures for fun. Anyway, go out and shoot: this is the best thing you can do. Everytime.
June 6, 2008 at 4:08 PM
I prefer RAW. I always prefer simple things when I have to work on these kind of stuff.
JPEG sometimes is shit, because looses informations.
The next step is to use RAW data format also to work on sounds, but ok, not now.
June 6, 2008 at 9:53 PM
Oh well, applying RAW format to sounds I think it will be a very interesting thing. But, are you sure that it doesn't exist yet?
June 7, 2008 at 12:55 AM
Yeah is already implemented... see audacity for example