by David Arnold and Gail Rutman

When photographers went from black-and-white to color, most stopped doing their own developing and printing, thus gaining convenience, but giving up the power to control the processing of their photos. Digital has brought that power back. Higher end digital cameras now give you the option of shooting in either a raw format, where you control the processing decisions, or JPEG, where your control is limited. Raw means more time at the computer, but can yield higher quality, and thus more saleable, photos.

Recently, in Outdoor Photographer, George Lepp argued that "If a JPEG is made under normal conditions and exposure is on the money, you’d be hard-pressed to tell it from a raw image that you spent considerable effort to optimize." Those are pretty big ifs. What are "normal conditions?" The conditions editorial stock photographers face often involve excessive contrast, non-standard color balance, and lighting situations that can fool even the best meters. And how often is your exposure "on the money?" Certainly under highly controlled studio conditions, but that’s not where most of us shoot.

Raw images retain all the data the camera records, and in a 12 or 14-bit format. This will allow you to make dramatic exposure and white balance adjustments without sacrificing image integrity as you convert to, and work in, a 16-bit format. With JPEG, however, the camera does the conversion, interpolating and ultimately discarding precious pixels to give you an 8-bit image to work with. This translates into 256 brightness levels instead of 65,536, and results in rougher transitions and decreased quality when you adjust brightness or color, bring out shadow detail, etc.

However if you do shoot under highly controlled conditions, JPEGs can save time and hassle. Studio photographers, in fact, often do use this format. Other situations that might make JPEG’s trade-offs worthwhile include: (1) Limited time. Photojournalists, who need immediate turnaround, often use JPEG, as do wedding photographers who have to review hundreds of images and deliver dozens of proofs before the couple leaves on their honeymoon. (2) Limited storage space. JPEG files are significantly smaller, so more will fit on your memory card. (3) Digital transmission. The smaller JPEG files fly faster over the Internet. (4) Convenience. You simply may not want to spend a lot of time in Photoshop. However even under these situations, there’s still one major reason to consider raw: archiving. Image-processing software will continue to improve, probably to levels unimaginable today. Shoot raw and you’ll be able to go back to those raw files and make your old images better than ever.