why you should shoot in RAW

Almost all entry-level, ‘prosumer’ and bridge cameras give you the option capture the RAW as well as (or instead of) the jpeg (.jpg).

There’s a good explanation of what RAW is here – but in short it is all the data your camera captures, uncompressed and unchanged.

Straight from the camera a RAW image might look ‘flatter’ and duller compared to a jpeg but as there is a lot more ‘data’ stored in the file about the image, there is greater scope for creating a pleasing image than working directly with a jpg.

White-balance

The first massive benefit of using RAW is being able to change the white balance after the photo has been taken.  For example, in the image below the white balance was way off due to the tungsten lighting in the church, but this was easily fixed by altering the white balance in post-processing:

Before: bad white balance

Changing the temperature / tint of the white balance is easy, and any popular editing applications (Photoshop, Paint Shop, Lightroom etc) can change this and rescue a badly lit image:

After: white balance fixed

Exposure

Another great thing about RAW is that any data in  ’blown’ or ‘clipped’ areas of an image, that would be lost during jpeg compression are often still there meaning you can have more scope to rescue a highly over or under exposed image.

Below, an example of a photograph which was accidentally over-exposed and was fixed during post processing – notice the detail still remains in the gentleman’s heads, and also some of the cloud detail in the sky was brought back:

Before: Over-exposed

After: Exposure reduced. Fixed

Any down-sides?

There are no real reasons why you shouldn’t shoot in RAW (as well as, or instead of) jpeg.  In the past one could argue that you are compromising on file-sizes, and you will run out of memory card space quicker; but as the price of memory cards go down and their capacity go up all the time I don’t think it’s any reason not to shoot in RAW.