There has been an ongoing debate for some time on the benefits of shooting in either RAW or JPEG, so as the good people we are, we thought we’d get involved!

From our perspective, it’s a slightly different argument, as we need to post process your images from either format to obtain a desired level of consistency throughout our workflow. There are benefits to us for both, for instance, although we have fairly heavyweight PC’s, when working with 2-3000+ images in RAW format for a client, we can see a marked difference in performance in comparison to working through a shoot taken in JPEG, with a similar number of images. This affects us directly as to how long the adjustments take, as each image takes that tiny bit longer to refresh. On the other hand, JPEG’s require a touch more work to obtain the same end result.

The main area to discuss, is how we find adjustments compare between the two formats. The answer is fairly simple: There’s very little to differentiate between the two as an end result! At their extremes, we agree that you’re able to bring back an image from the brink a little more often with a file in RAW format, whereas one shot in JPEG may have to be culled, but it’s only due to the greater latitude enjoyed by RAW over JPEG.

With modern post processing software, gone are the days when the decision was far more clear cut amongst RAW aficionados, and many of you don’t actually need to rely too much on rescuing every single shot as you’re actually real photographers, who take pride in your talents and have the technical knowledge to take good images. Thus, the majority of our work is not only adjustments for exposure and contrast, something which neither format has a benefit, but also to process images in a particular style of the photographer.

The RAW format is the most pure form data that the cameras’ sensor has captured, but the JPEG that is converted in camera from the same data is not that far off. If you’re making a lot of enlargements, we’d recommend shooting in RAW as it’s a touch more difficult to create artifact free enlargements when making larger exposure adjustments and noise reductions for instance.