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RAW versus JPEG

If you’re serious about shooting high quality digital images then you will need to work in RAW.
As for the debate about choosing between shooting JPEG or RAW, anyone who thinks that you can achieve the same quality in JPEG is dreaming. Shoot JPEG if you’re confident you’ve got every setting optimised on your camera and you need speedy results. Shoot RAW if you want total flexibility, the highest quality your camera can deliver and the most control over the final image.

Working with RAW images requires skilled use of your software and you have to put the time and effort into learning how to extract the best out of your original file. Which is why many people are disappointed by the results they get when they convert their RAW images. Camera manufacturers know what they are doing and generally deliver a very good result with ‘out of camera’ JPEGs, where the camera software has made all the decisions for you. So to beat this standard requires effort, skill and the knowledge to take each processing decision correctly.
There are plenty of books and online tutorials to help you.

Before you dash off to process some of your images you may want to look at the article below which I’ve published at the same time as this one.

Cheers for now,
Paul

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