50 REASONS WHY RAW ROCKS
1 RAW LETS YOU MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR CAMERA
Raws hold the full amount of color information your camera is capable of capturing. By contrast, if you choose your camera’s JPEG quality, it will process the image to a JPEG in-camera, then throw away all the excess data. With raws we can harness this extra data to give us extra headroom when editing, greater color options and higherquality photos. So by choosing raw format over JPEG, you unleash the full potential of your camera.
2 INCREASED HIGHLIGHT DETAIL
Raws hold greater detail at the tonal extremes than JPEGs can. Highlights in a JPEG are particularly fragile: if an area looks blown out at first glance, chances are the detail is lost. But with a raw, there’s a good chance we can pull back some of that lost detail using the Exposure and Highlight controls in Camera Raw or Lightroom.
3 GREATER SHADOW DETAIL
In high-contrast scenes, it can be difficult to record detail in both the highlights and the shadows, so the shadows may come out very dark. But there’s more to a raw file than first meets the eye.
You’ll often find with raws that they hold an astonishing amount of shadow detail, so you can rescue deep shadows and silhouettes from pure black to balance out your image. By contrast, JPEGs hold less detail in the shadows, and lightening shadows can lead to increased noise and unnatural color shifts (although there’s usually more chance of rescuing shadows than highlights in JPEGs).
4 CHOOSE WHITE BALANCE PRESETS
With raws, you can choose a white balance preset after taking the photo, with exactly the same results as if you’d done so before pressing the shutter button. By contrast, with JPEGs the white balance is burnt into the file, so it’s trickier to tweak afterwards. Camera Raw and Lightroom both offer white balance presets at the top of the Basic Panel that match those found in your camera settings.
