Shooting raw?

[Harewood]

What are the advantages of shooting in RAW please?
harewood

[Skyelines]

The main one is that RAW files contain the most information.. By contrast with the JPG the camera has altered the data from the sensor to reduce the file size. This means that there is less to work with when using picture editing software.

[SpringfieldPhoto]

In simple terms
A Jpeg file can reproduce 16,777,216 tones of colour (This theoretical maximum is never actually achieved)
A RAW file from a modern camera can reproduce 2,415,919,104 possible tones of colour (again this is the theoretical maximum)
Mind blowing numbers but assuming the maximums are reached you are throwing away 2.4 billion tones
The reason these are theoretical maximums is because no image will have the full spectrum of colours in it.

[Skyelines]

Probably the best way to show the difference is with pictures.

Here are crops of a poor picture taken a long time ago on a 350D with the 24-105 F4L and saved on camera as RAW and Jpeg.
The first ones are unedited just converted to Jpeg to upload in the case of the RAW file.

The reason for shooting raw stands out quite well.

RAW file



JPEG



The Raw file was edited in Lightroom to recover as much of the information available and enhance it.


The Jpeg was edited in Adobe Elements and only very minor adjustments started to destroy the picture most noticeable in the sky.

[Harewood]

Awesome replies, thanks.

[El Sid]

As shown by Skyeline raw allows for far more adjustment than any JPEG and it also allows you to recover from certain kinds of mistakes. A typical error is forgetting to set or reset the correct white balance. Some WB errors can be corrected in JPEGs though the results are rarely entirely satisfactory but some like shooting with Daylight WB in artificial light are basically impossible - in RAW you can simply select the desired WB setting in the converter and the image is instantly corrected.

Another real problem is if you shoot in Monochrome mode and then forget to go back to colour - with JPEGs you're stuffed, once it's mono there's no going back but with a RAW file colour is always available because the raw file records all the data even in Monochrome mode. Indeed many if not most 3rd party RAW converters always display the image in colour regardless of the camera settings. Canons own DPP converter is the only one I have that shows Canon RAW files with the Monochrome picture style applied but again you just click on a different style to get the colour back.

I suppose one slight 'downside' to RAW is that it does encourage fiddling and a tendency to continue to strive to make a perfect image - even when you already have...

[SpringfieldPhoto]

Since getting my first EOS digital camera I have always shot in RAW and I have to agree with Nigel, it does encourage you to fiddle with images that really don't need it. Perhaps that's why I have ended up with such a vast amount of computer disc.

[Harewood]

Thanks for the extremely informative & helpful replies. I have decided to give it a go.
harewood