When to shoot RAW and when not to
The fight of believe systems
You go on YouTube and you find people stating that you should be shooting RAW 100% of the time and JPEG is just not good enough for your work. And whilst I agree that RAW is technically better, there might be some reasons why you don’t want to shoot it. Let me explain.
Why to shoot RAW
RAW is the daddy of formats when you’re a photographer. It retains a lot of information from the camera which makes post processing in Lighteoom etc a breeze. Highlights, shadows etc. can be recovered without much trouble. If you shoot weddings or high profile work in the studio such as fashion or product photography, nothing else would make sense for you. You just need the flexibility of RAW to get the result you want.
Why to shoot JPEG
JPEG compressed your files and immediately reduces the amount of usable information from your camera. Meaning that you start with a heavily compressed file that didn’t retain much information to begin with. Now why the heck would I ahoot JPEG? I can hear you ask. Well, there might be a few reasons why.
You shoot sports and the card leaves your hand and goes to an agent who sends it directly for printing. You just shoot and send the photo off. No time for Lightroom etc.
You’re on a budget and can’t afford huge memory cards
You don’t want to work in Lightroom etc. and are happy with what you got
Your existing memory cards is running out of space and you need to get some shots in
Why you should dynamically choose, but don’t
Look, I’ll admit it. Every photo I take is important to me, even if I delete it later when it falls through my selection process. So I always shoot in RAW. JPEG is shot maybe 0.0002% of the time and it’s acceptable for iPhone photography. But for my professional line of work I can allow myself to shoot RAW exclusively. And when you start out shooting, you’ll love to be able to pull back 3-5 stops of an underexposed image. RAW gives you that safety net and a world of possibilities.
So the next time you know what mode to shoot in. But please, there’s only RAW and RAW.