Home Forums Gear Photography raw vs jpeg

I would say RAW is the highest quality but the files are much, much larger. As I understand it, with RAW, you never actually make changes to the original, but rather store information about each change you've made. This means that image quality can be maintained no matter how much image manipulation is done.

Once you've got the image looking the way you want it, you will probably have to convert it to Jpeg, (or perhaps TIFF) to enable to be printed ect.

With Jpeg, the image quality is slightly worse, and the further degrades every time the image is altered and re saved. In a lot of situations, this is only slight and not really of any consequence for many applications.

That said, Jpeg's are easier to transmit, print ect.

These days some camera's allow you to take a photo simultaneously in both RAW and Jpeg which gives you the best of both worlds but uses a lot of memory..