The RAW Truth (from the uniformly excellent Luminous Landscape) take a look at reasons to shoot RAW files as opposed to JPEGs.
I shoot RAW and always have done.
The RAW Truth hits the nail on the head as to the reasons I shoot RAW.
I do it so that I can go back after the fact to tweak the image to make it look its best.
The reasons I do this rather than just getting the shot right the first time is that I am an amateur and as an amateur I make mistakes, lots of mistakes.
Setting the colour balance incorrectly is my favourite mistake at the moment.
But it doesn’t really matter what the colour balance is set to as I can adjust it afterwards with no loss of quality.
What’s really interesting for me though is that when I first bought my camera I was utterly unaware that I could tweak that sort of stuff after the fact. I shot RAW then as I just wanted the best quality images I could possibly get (I’d spent a lot on the camera, I wasn’t going to settle for JPEG).
So I’ve shot RAW since day one, and of course the fantastic thing about that is that I can go back to the photos I took back then (when I really really didn’t know what I was doing) and improve those images too, again with no loss of quality.
This is a really important thing for me. I bought the camera to take photos in New Zealand.
That trip cost a lot of money, I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back there again (although I hope to).
It’s really comforting to know that I can go back to the photos I took back then and with a little more experience and know-how improve those images without worrying about loss of image quality.
Really comforting indeed.