RAW - Pros and Cons?

[Neville Bailey]

As a beginner, I often see members refer to shooting in RAW mode, which apparently has huge benefits post production, yet other members seem to shy away from it.

Can anyone tell me what the pros and cons are of shooting in RAW mode?

[RichardTaylor]

Pro:

You are taking the camera (up to a point) out of the loop on how your final image looks.

Cons.
Reduced number of images you can shoot in a burst (compared to shooting jpgs)
Increased storage requirements.
Increased post processing workload (you may not need to PP jpgs at all)

[Doug Pardee]

Technical pros of Raw:

1. An in-camera JPEG file is created from only part of the "dynamic range" that is present in the Raw file. This is probably the technical reason for using Raw.
2. An in-camera JPEG file represents a limited color gamut, typically sRGB, while the Raw file contains all of the color data captured by the camera. (In practice, sRGB is quite good enough for just about any usage; only a few printers can produce images outside the sRGB range.)
3. Some in-camera JPEG files may have had excessive noise reduction applied to them. There's no good way to undo noise reduction. Mainly important for low-light photography.

Operational pros of Raw:

1. You don't need to learn how to use any of the in-camera JPEG conversion settings.
2. You don't need to concern yourself with the in-camera JPEG conversion settings while shooting — White Balance is the biggie. According to an online survey some years back, the #1 reason that photographers chose Raw was so they didn't have to think about White Balance in the field.

Neurosis-satisfying pros of Raw:

1. What if I got that once-in-a-lifetime shot, but I flubbed up the in-camera JPEG settings so badly that when I corrected the image in post-processing, artifacts showed up? I'd kill myself.
2. Why would anyone want to throw away data bits even if those bits don't contribute to the image? You never know when you might need them. Storage is cheap.
3. Anything less than perfect White Balance is lame.

Technical pros of JPEG:

1. A few camera models do significant lens corrections and such to in-camera JPEGs.

Operational pros of JPEG:

1. Smaller file size (not really a big deal).
2. For many cameras, a longer burst length in continuous mode (important only in a few rare situations).
3. Can print immediately, whether to a printer or at a photo processing facility, or for transmitting to a photo-blog or a news organization (Raw+JPEG can handle that on most cameras).
4. Spend more time with the camera, less time with the computer. For those of us who work with a computer for a living, camera=fun and computer=work.
5. Fewer files to keep track of for each image.

The gamut, white balance, and most of the in-camera JPEG settings are pretty much irrelevant for B&W photography. On the other hand, for many kinds of B&W photography, the increased dynamic range in Raw is a big consideration.

[OsmosisStudios]

Simple: Are you AT ALL interested in editing/manipulating/correcting/perfecting your photos? if so, shoot RAW. If not, shoot JPG.

[ElCapitan]

Doug did a good job of explaining it in detail. In short, RAW allows you to control your image and not the camera, however it does require you to do the pp to get the image you want.

[Neville Bailey]

Thanks for all the replies - that was very informative!

My next question is this: Is there any good (free) RAW editing software that I can use to pay around with, before committing myself to buying some software? I don't have Photoshop, only GIMP and it doesn't seem to have RAW editing capabilities.

[kirbinster]

Fairly certain GIMP does that. You can download a full function free 30 day trial of Adobe Lightroom from their site and play with it for free.

[IABoomer]

You might need to get ufraw or RawTherapee to experiment with the files. That, or most manufacturers offer some piece of software for dealing with their native files. On Nikon, it's ViewNX (if memory serves me right) which you can download from Nikon's website. I'm sure Canon, Sony, etc. have similar applications.

UFRaw - Download & Install

RawTherapee Downloads

Current versions of Nikon software

[Ruchika_2011]

RAW format is analogous to negatives in days of films. The way a film could be processed then in non destructive manner the same thing applies to RAW. While maintaining the master copy of an image you can process it according to your visualization in your workstation. This relieves you from worrying about in-camera settings like exposure compensation, setting saturation levels or white balance mode. It allows you to concentrate on composing the scene alone. You can check a comprehensive comparison of RAW and JPEG here.

[dlambert]

Until recently, it was a pain to get Windows Explorer to view RAW files, so I experimented with a couple programs as RAW file viewers. Of these, FastStone Image Viewer seemed pretty decent - it's got a nice feature set for really basic operations.

If you're not quite ready to jump into a more intense workflow, I'd consider something like this to just do a simple RAW-to-JPG conversion on your files. I've also used Paint.net for editing, but this requires a plugin to read RAW files. Even shooting RAW+JPG might be an option if you're not planning on doing much with the RAW files right now.

The real key here is to save those RAW files. One of the most compelling arguments for shooting RAW is that you can go back to that original RAW file as many times as you want and re-process it. If you end up getting Photoshop or Lightroom later, you can review your favorite photos and (hopefully) improve on the conversion a bit. More likely, though, is that you'll learn new post-processing techniques, or decide to try a photo in B&W, or whatever. In any event, if you've got that original RAW file, you can always make more JPGs. No matter how hard you try, though, you can't make a RAW from a JPG.