Raw vs JPEG: Real-world photography examples; advantages and disadvantages Video Lecture | Capture like a Pro: Digital Photography Tutorial - Professional Skills

Hi, I'm Tony Northrup, and for the book Stunning Digital Photography
I'd like to talk about raw files. Raw
files take
all the data captured by your camera sensor
and put it into a
really big file that you can process later.
Now that's distinct from a
jpeg file. If you use jpeg files,
your camera
takes all that raw data and processes
it in camera
and then you get to work with that
processed file. Now you might notice that
a jpeg file tends to be about three
megabytes, whereas a raw file might be
25 megabytes. The difference is important.
The raw file's
giving you way way way more data. In fact,
it's giving
every bit of data that the sensor captures.
The jpeg file drops an awful lot of that data.
Your jpeg pictures might still look good,
but they don't have all the data in them.
For example a raw file will capture,
let's say, 10,000 different bits,
different gradients, from black to
white and it will store them all. When you
save it as a jpeg file,
it has to clip the top and bottom part of that.
It clips some the shadows and some of the
highlights and that means you're losing
detail. To demonstrate that, let's look at
some jpeg files and raw files in
my photo editing app, Lightroom.
Here I have a picture of a train shot in both raw and jpeg.
And you can see that this is a pretty
challenging scenario, I'm shooting
directly into the sun here.
I'll switch over to the develop module and
try to recover some of the highlights.
You can see I am able to retrieve some of the information.
Now let's look at the RAW file instead.
Now, you can see how much more information I
was able to recover there.
I was able to see quite a bit more of the
train
in that one than in here. You can see
how much more that sunburst covers up.
Now I'll switch over to the raw file one more
time and
bring up the shadows a little bit. And
you can see that
I'm able to get a much clearer picture
from the raw file than I could from the
jpeg file.
Another good use for raw files is white
balance. In this night shot of the Brooklyn
bridge you can see the white balance is
terrible.
With a jpeg file you can adjust the white
balance, but it's not quite as perfect
because your camera has already decided
upon the white balance
in camera and set that permanently for
you.
With a raw file, you have quite a bit
more flexibility and you don't have to worry
about any data loss, so you can fix the white balance
and you will still retain perfect detail
as if you had set the white balance
correctly in the first place.
Of course it's always ideal, but you don't have to make those
decisions
at the time you're shooting with a raw file. You get to make those decisions later.
Which means, if you happent to make a mistake or if
the lighting situation is such that it
would be impossible to pick one right
answer,
you can fix it in post as long as you
shoot RAW. This gives you more power
later on.
Let's look at a couple more examples. This is Shibuyo station in Tokyo, Japan and it's the busiest
intersection in the world. Which means I
couldn't necessarily bracket shots,
because you can see just how much
movement there is here.
So HDR wouldn't work to capture this
huge dynamic range between the darks and
the blown-out highlights here. You know, look at the sign up here and you can see you can't
read those words at all,
this is completely white. With raw, I
can drag these highlights down
and suddenly the sign is completely
readable. Take a look at this area of the
sign over here
and how much is lost versus how much can be recovered.
Now I'll switch over to the jpeg file and we'll
look at the same blue sign up here.
I'll try to recover the highlights and you'll
see it's just not as good.
Do a before and after with the raw file.
That's the raw file,
and that's the jpeg file. Once again the
raw file shows
far more detail and the jpeg just has
more and more blown out.
Here is another example, this is
a sunset shot of the Boston skyline, and you can see
it's at dusk but the sky is completely blown out. This is actually a great exposure for
a night shot because I'm
capturing all the detail in the shadows
here and if it were a jpeg the shot would
just be a loss.
But with a raw file I can drag those
highlights down
and you can just see a ton of detail
in the sky. You can see
even though the sky looked over-exposed
initially there's absolutely no detail lost.
Lot's of dust here, but you can see these
wispy clouds.
Now let me switch over to the jpeg file
and I'll drop the exposure down to
recover the highlights, and you can see
what happens. There's
a little bit of detail that can be
recovered but you see these terrible
lines up here.
Switching back to the raw file just
looks so much better.
Here's another
high dynamic range situation, this one in the day. You can see this
ruin in Ireland is completely in shadow
because you have these
overcast skies here. But there's a great
deal of detail in both the shadows and
the highlights here. So,
with the raw file I can drag up these shadows and drag down these highlights
and just overall reduce the contrast of it.
Now, let me pull the blues down a little bit to show some more detail in the sky.
And, wow, that's just a lot of detail that
was recovered in that picture.
Now let's take a look at the jpeg file.
That's the jpeg file... and this is the
raw file
edited. Now I can try to do that same
editing here
in the jpeg file. And you can see I'm able
to recover some of it
drag the blues down.
You can see after processing the
raw file just looks much much better.
because you have all that extra
information.
When you choose jpeg files, your camera
processes that in the camera
and just throws away that information forever. When you pick raw, you can always go back and save
it and you have
all the detail that your camera sensor
was able to capture.
Wildlife shots can be really challenging because you don't necessarily get to make adjustments and
shoot later.
Here I saw this ibis flying and I had to
captured it with whatever settings I had,
I didn't get to
take a picture and then look at my
settings and think about it. And I did a
pretty good job
but you can see it's a little bit
underexposed. That the detail
that we wanna see are these gorgeous colors in the
bird's wings and in a jpeg file, that
would be lost. But,
look here in the raw file and you'll see that we can recover
a great deal of detail in this picture.
I'll drag the exposure up
and pull these shadows up and you'll see what happens.
Now that's just amazing, you can see all this
metallic color in this
ibis, just really beautiful. And with a jpeg
file
all that would be lost.
Here is a little more extreme example, this
osprey had caught a fish but
because the sky was overcast it's
completely blown out and he's completely
in shadow.
Now, here's an answer- wait around for
better lighting, right?
But you don't always necissarily wanna waste
a whole day of shooting because I had
bad weather that day. But with raw, this
file can be recovered.
So the first thing I'll do is pull the
highlights down to recover some
blue in the sky and then I'll just drag
the shadows up some.
Pull the exposure up a little until the
bird is well exposed.
Some more shadows and then drop the blacks down
And you can see I ended up with a pretty
good picture
Another wildlife picture. I shot this flycatcher at sunset and it was
just beautiful. And the lighting is
beautiful, you can see, because the reeds
are backlit, that they're kind of glowing.
With wildlife usually want the subject
to be
front-lit, but I wouldn't have had the
beautiful lighting on the reeds if I did that.
With raw, however, I can expose it properly
for the reeds and then recover so much
of the shadow detail that you'll be able
to see the bird nicely.
So I'll pull up the shadows here
bump the exposure up just a little bit
and you can see it ended up being
just really nice picture. So I hope
you'll check your camera's manual and
learn how to turn on raw files for it.
There are a few disadvantages that you
should know about. Raw files are
way bigger and that's where the
disadvantages come from. You can
fit fewer pictures on a single memory
card, so you are going to need
bigger memory cards or more of them. You
fun out of buffer faster, so if you're, say,
shooting wildlife or sports and you're
holding down that shutter on continuous
you might find that you run out of buffer
in six or seven pictures.
It depends on the camera, but after you run out of buffer
the number of pictures you can take is gonna slow down a lot. Like it's gonna go from
being
4 or 5 pictures a second to one picture a
second. So if you find that you're running out of buffer
all the time,
it might be better to switch back to jpeg. It also takes up a lot more disk space.
If you take thousands of pictures a week
you could find yourself buying a new
hard drive pretty soon, but nowadays hard
drives are so cheap I say
go for raw, delete the pictures you
don't need and you probably won't have
any problem with that at all.
If you liked this video, please click
subscribe up above and
like down below. And I hope that you'll check out my
book, Stunning Digital Photography,
which has more than two hours of
instructional video. It focuses on
photographic technique, so you'll learn
how to get the picture right in camera
but I also show you all the advantages
of using raw in different scenarios
including
for night photography and HDR.
Thanks.