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I have changed my opinion about shooting in Raw format. Since I posted on the subject back in September 2007, I have come to what I think will be my final conclusion on the subject. Since my opinion has essentially reversed from my initial position, (articulated back in September of 2006) I thought I’d take some time to talk about what led up to the change.

While Ken Rockwell remains a fan of JPEG, I have converted to shooting Raw. The final straw came as a result of two images I needed to process.

The first image is this one of a quiet morning on Seventh Lake in the Adirondack Mountains:

While this is a nice image, it needs to be brightened slightly to add shadow detail in the trees, and the light fixture at the peak of the boathouse roof gets distracting when you do that. Here is the result I needed:

The problem is that I only have this image in JPEG format. I wasn’t shooting Raw when this was taken. I wanted to print this image 20×30 for my portfolio. After manipulating it a couple of times (because I wasn’t clued in to the ramifications at first) I sent it to Shutterfly for printing. What came back was good, but has significant pixellation and artifacts due to resizing.

The original image is 1.74 megabytes on disk. The manipulated copy I sent for printing was 535 kilobytes due to lossy JPEG compression! I lost approximately two-thirds of all the data captured by my camera’s sensor! Of course the image I got back was less than perfect.

The second image was this one (I only show a crop here because it’s of my granddaughter and I don’t post images of our grandchildren on the Web):

As you can see, the image is too dark. This happened because she was playing and I was shooting, but the best image happened at a moment when the flash wasn’t ready. So I needed to brighten the image. Here’s the result:

Note that terrible noise behind her hair. Removing that meant a lot of work using layers and further degrading parts of the image. This noise was noticeable even in a 4×6 print.

JPEG images delete some of the data captured by the camera. Raw images allow it to be preserved no matter what I do–assuming I use intelligent software. I can’t afford to throw away image data, so now I shoot Raw. Since my Nikon has the option to shoot both Raw and JPEG at the same time, I actually do that so that I can quickly print some images or show them to family without processing them.

I won’t be going back.