Home Forums Gear Photography raw vs jpeg

Everyone has their own opinions as to why to shoot RAW or why to shoot JPEG. Be your own judge. This is a shot from a sequence I did for an HDR picture. When a shot is over or especially under exposed and you correct for the details you get noise and lose color. The chairs in the final shots are completely hidden in shadow in the original shot. I developed the shot in Lightroom 5 using the RAW file, then copied the develop settings and used them to process the JPEG. Even a blind man can see the difference in the details of the shot. There is much more detail in the shadow area with less contrast and if you notice the color to the left of the chair, the JPEG file completely falls apart.
Again a JPEG is an image that the processor in the camera makes development decisions, RAW allows the photographer to choose what it will look like. Any file will look pretty good in flat bright even light. When there is high contrast in the image a JPEG can not handle it anywhere nearly as nicely as the RAW file.

Original JPEG shot SSOC



JPEG processed to the same settings as the RAW file



RAW file processed and saved as a JPEG