RAW or JPEG?
Posted by admin | Posted in Beginners Guide, Pentax DSLR, Pentax photos | Posted on 25-04-2009-05-2008
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RAW or JPEG?
How many articles have you read about the superiority of RAW over JPEG? Quite a few, I’m guessing. I’m sure you have also come across opinions saying that JPEG is adequate for most situations. So who is right? Which option is best? My answer is: BOTH!
You might ask “Why bother with two formats and have more work to do and take more space on your memory card?” Well, today you can buy 8GB SD card for peanuts, and having two formats is actually less work, not more (wise people say “Less is more”).
When I bought my first Pentax DSLR, I tested RAW and I thought that there’s little benefit to it, so I quickly switched to JPEG. Then after a while I had a problem with photos having really weird and unnatural colours in certain situations and shooting conditions. I spent some time trying to figure out what the problem was, until I retook those photos in RAW – the colours were perfect! So now I switched to RAW and continued snapping happily.
But now a problem appeared – my old computer was really slow at processing RAW files and it took some 30 seconds to process one photo into a JPEG (Pentium 4, 1.8Ghz). I bought a really fast computer and now it was a pure pleasure (Intel quad core: 4×2.4Ghz). 30 seconds were reduced to 3 seconds – WOW! But still, I noticed that I wasted a lot of time to make photos look really good. Suddenly a perspective of going and taking photos stopped being so appealing as I started to think about how much time I’d have to spend processing those photos.
After some time I decided to do some tests and compare RAW to JPEG again. My Pentax K10D has a RAW+ function, which makes the camera to record both RAW and JPEG at the same time. I noticed that some JPEG’s were quite different from RAW, as expected, but very often they were better! I tried to manipulate my RAW file in a lot of ways using Adobe Lightroom, and I could not produce the same colours as I had in the JPEG from the camera. Eureka! I need to use RAW+ mode all the time! Pentax even has a dedicated RAW button, but I don’t use it now at all – I constantly use RAW+JPEG mode.
Now, I save a lot of time by deleting the RAW files when JPEG’s look good, and sometimes I keep both files as they give me two different photos, both equally interesting. That’s a win-win!
Compare the photos and guess which one is from RAW
(the answer is at the very bottom of this article):
Now, let’s summarize:
• Shooting in RAW only:
1. No need to worry about white balance.
2. Sharper photos (marginally).
3. All the information is retained, so you can retrieve details that would be washed out or blackened in a JPEG.
4. Less noise (marginally).
5. Greater contrast (potentially).
6. Weigh some 5-10 times more than JPEG files, so you need a bigger memory card.
• Shooting in JPEG only:
1. Adequate for most situations.
2. Little post-processing is required.
3. Best format for storing and sharing photos.
4. Colour might be lost or distorted if wrong white balance is set in the camera.
5. Details might be lost if you over- or underexpose your photos.
• Shooting in RAW+JPEG:
1. More to choose from – you can choose to keep the best one or keep both of them.
2. Time saved on processing RAW files (you can simply delete RAW files if JPEG is good enough).
3. You don’t need to worry about white balance so much (you might screw your JPEG, but RAW is not affected by white balance).
4. More space is taken on your memory card and computer hard drive.
5. It is the safest option as you have the RAW file if you need to retrieve the details that are gone on JPEG.
So now do yourself a favour and start shooting in RAW+. For more tips and photography articles, please check other articles of this blog – www.PentaxBody.com
*Answer: the bottom photo is from RAW – you can see there are more details retrieved from underexposed photo, so it looks more natural, but the JPEG has its charm as well 
Kamil Wawrzyszko
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