When you first get started in digital photography, it's much easier to just leave your camera in JPEG shooting mode. Sooner or later though, most people decide that it's time to switch to raw, and once we switch, we usually wish we'd switched much sooner. Today we're going to...
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RAW vs JPEG Example - JPEG
RAW vs JPEG Example - RAW
RAW vs JPEG Example - JPEG 100% Crop
RAW vs JPEG Example - RAW 100% Crop
RAW vs JPEG Example - JPEG Sharpened
RAW vs JPEG Example - JPEG Heavy Compression
RAW Crop Exported at Photoshop Quality 10 JPEG
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8 Comments
Steven James Martin
Posted at 22:35h, 23 JuneDo I get a fine art print for inspiring this week’s episode Martin? 😛
Just kidding, but glad you covered this topic. I’m keen to return to it myself in the near future, as I never got a satisfactory answer from various online forums and experts as to why my JPEGs processed in Lightroom look so much better than my RAW files processed in Lightroom.
I think this is down to the in-camera Nikon processing, but despite trying Camera Profiles in Lightroom (Standard, Vivid etc.) I can’t seem to replicate these with the RAW files – and I don’t want to switch to Capture NX!
Anyway, I don’t want to go into this again without all the necessary evidence (100% crops) to back it up, so perhaps I’ll focus on five example photos from stevenjamesmartin.com/burma and write a blog post about it soon (if you’re interested!)
Cheers
Martin Bailey
Posted at 22:47h, 23 June🙂
I haven’t a clue why you’re seeing that. It’s probably due to some of the settings that you have turned on in the camera, but you’ll certainly get better quality images in raw once you’ve figured it out. How about Dropboxing me an raw and JPEG file of the same scene for me to see if I can find out what’s going off?
Steven James Martin
Posted at 23:06h, 23 JuneYeah that’d be super, if you don’t mind – I didn’t want to bother you too much with it! I’ll send you direct links to some files. But if you don’t have time no worries.
Martin Bailey
Posted at 23:08h, 23 JuneI don’t mind at all Steve. Send away!
A Evans
Posted at 23:50h, 24 JuneAnother major reason for RAW is highlight and shadow recovery. Under/overexposed JPEGs have little scope for improvement without banding but RAW files do much better.
Donna Wayne
Posted at 00:42h, 20 JanuaryI first decided to switch while I was still learning about photography and found this http://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/camera-raw/ I realized the big difference between a JPEG and a RAW file, and a big difference in editing a RAW file. Thanks for the article, it’s very useful and informative for beginners who don’t know that much about RAW files and editing 🙂
blankner
Posted at 11:30h, 15 JuneThank you so much! I’ve just started using Camera Plus on the iPhone 7 and trying to understand RAW. This article helped immensely.