Should You Shoot RAW?

You've probably heard about RAW and its supposed benefits, but should you be shooting RAW? If you are a beginner, any seasoned photographer will tell you that the best way to improve and get acquainted with your camera is to snap, snap, snap...take as many photographs as you can. By doing this, you get to know the limits of your camera and its best settings under different shooting conditions. JPEG takes less memory card space than RAW, so in this aspect I would suggest you begin by taking JPEG pictures until you are better at judging the optimum settings for any scene you encounter.

Secondly, RAW can turn you into a lazy photographer. Don't believe me? Take a look at these two photographs I took while I was experimenting with RAW.

Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) EF-S 55-250mm IS @ 60mm 1/100s F/8 ISO 400

Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) EF-S 55-250mm IS @ 79mm 1/100s F/4.5 ISO 800

Both of these represent the extremes of the histogram (I will talk about the histogram in a future post). One is completely white, while the other is completely black. In the first, the speed was too slow for the condition, and the speed was too fast for the second one. 

If this had been JPEG, I wouldn't have bothered to fix them as it takes too long to fix something like this and the final image would have punished the quality so much that it wouldn't have been worth the hassle. 

Keep in mind that I did this on purpose to see what I could get away with in RAW, but it's not unusual to take such pictures while you are still getting used to playing around with the settings, so don't feel bad if some of your shots turn out this way. 

Here's what came out once I finished retouching them in Camera Raw.

For this one, I simply reduced exposure by a few stops, darkened the highlights, and made a few other adjustments to bring out this image.

This one was more unforgiving as the noise was simply too much. I cranked up the exposure, then used the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw to pump it up again, put saturation at 0, pumped up contrast and clarity both to 100, and did a few other things to try to bring out the image. I still like the effect of the enlarged pixels, so I cropped it to try to highlight them more.

Kind of like a mosaic, right? 

Well, these images are extremes, but they show how one can take an image without putting too much stock in using the right exposure settings by shooting RAW. 

I, personally, shoot RAW, but I still put as much effort into using the right exposure as if I was shooting JPEG. RAW can be your best friend, but it can also be a hindrance into you becoming a good photographer if you are not careful. I strongly suggest you shoot JPEG until you are familiar with all the aspects of exposure, then you can focus on RAW and learning the software needed to fully get the most out of it. You will appreciate the extra leverage give by RAW that way, too.

Another thing is that as a beginner or intermediate photographer, your focus should be on learning about taking a good picture and not manipulating them. If you haven't done so, take a look at my previous post on taking a great photograph. After that, you will find you don't have to manipulate a picture as much, and you will be well on your way to being the great photographer we all know you can be.

Great snapping, folks.

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