Raw or JEG? For photographers that can be a question that leads to a fist fight. Well, except that might mean that a camera would get damaged, so maybe we can just agree to disagree or something more civil. If you take photos, chances are that you are aware of the debate I am talking about. A few weeks ago I was talking with Kirk author of the aptly named, Conversation is an Engine, blog about the raw vs. jpeg question. I gave him the short version answer, which is that I shoot both. It did make me think though about my workflow and why I do what I do.
Part of the reason I shoot both is that I have one DSLR camera that I use for both my professional work and my personal photos. I keep it set to jpeg and raw in part so I don’t accidentally forget to reset for raw when I am working. Setting the camera that way does create a lot of files and take up a lot of space on my machine. Because I choose to shoot this way, I have to be disciplined about throwing away files I don’t need. For me, most of my family snapshots I will only ever need a 4×6 print, jpeg is fine for that. Here is an example of a photo I would keep only in jpeg:
ISO 200 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/5
Some would argue that I should have kept the Raw version, that I might want to edit it more in the future. That is a pretty good argument, and it is true that extra space doesn’t cost that much. I guess I’m just pretty sure I won’t ever need a Raw version.
Here is one that I shot in Raw, and kept the Raw version:
ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/400
I shot this one in Raw because I knew that I would be making this into an HDR image and I wanted as much detail as possible, so it was worth the space on my computer to save the larger file.
How about you? Raw? JPEG? both? feel free to leave a comment below. If you have written a blog post about it, leave a link if you would like.
Cheers!
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