Photography: What's the difference between JPEG and RAW?
Hey!
Today Miro wanted to boast to me, how he can take and edit photos so much easier, faster and nicer on his smartphone.
I told him he's going to have some trouble, if he's shot a photo that has a lot of contrast, say on a bright sunny day.
He may see a windowsill with cool decor, and want to take a photo of Ninnu playing outside through the window. If there's sunshine outside, he'll be out of luck if he can't take the photo with a good camera with RAW capability.
An example:
These two photos were taken simultaneously on my camera. The one on the right is the JPEG image created by the camera, based on the RAW photo on the left which contains all the information the camera sensor saw at the moment of taking the picture. (I converted them both into unedited jpeg files to demonstrate the difference.)
Original RAW
Original JPEG
You'll notice, that the kitchen behind the bookshelf is well lit, and the bookshelf is not very well lit, because we had our lights turned off in the livingroom.
You may also notice that the Jpeg has a bit more light, and looks just a little bit warmer. This is because the camera does generally do some editinig of its own to the picture. (I'm not sure what, because I thought I had turned all editing features off.)
Anyways. Now we've come to the interesting part...
The edit
The only edits I did to both the photos were as follows:
- I turned on the
Shadows and highlightstool, which by default brings the shadows up 50%, and brings the highlights down by 50%. - I then pushed the exposure up by 2.62 stops.
That's it... So let's see what happened.
Edited RAW
Edited JPEG
Conclusion
We can clearly see, that on the left side photo everything is visible quite nicely, but something very bad happened to the Jpeg photo. The books now seem visible, but even then, the quality has degraded to a point the photo would basically be unusable.
Moral of the story?: Shoot RAW whenever possible.
I have nothing against taking photos with a smartphone, but I want to spread the knowledge that it often comes with serious drawbacks especially when shooting in harsh contrast conditions.
I hope you found this post enlightening.
See you again soon!
(Something wrong with the formatting of this post. Can't figure it out.)
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