Happy Monday! Today I’m continuing my education series for photographers on simple steps that I took in my business that led to big results! If you missed the first two posts, you can check those out here and here!
I want to talk to you today about the advantages of shooting in RAW! If you are a photographer and you are not shooting in RAW, the honest truth is you should be!!
When I first started pursuing photography, I heard people say that shooting in RAW was better, but I didn’t really understand why! I remember the first time I went into the settings menu on my camera and changed my shooting mode from jpeg to RAW. I honestly didn’t like it! I thought the images didn’t look as good! I actually liked the way the compressed jpg images looked compared to the RAW files. I loaded the images into my computer and tried playing with them in Bridge (what I was using before I had Lightroom) and I just couldn’t get them to look as vibrant as the images looked when I was shooting in jpeg!I had heard that one of the main reasons to shoot in RAW was that you have more control over the images, but to be honest, I didn’t know what to do with all of that control! So, I gave up. I continued on my merry way shooting in jpeg not understanding what I was missing!
That was a huge mistake! Instead of trying to understand how it worked, I just gave up! No, I didn’t have any angry clients who were upset that I wasn’t shooting in RAW. Honestly, 99% of your clients won’t know the difference! But I did miss out on an opportunity to learn, grow, and improve my skills both in shooting and in editing! Eventually, I gave in and started shooting in RAW exclusively, only because I heard that’s what I was supposed to be doing! It took me a while to fully appreciate it, but eventually I did and now I will never go back!
You see, a RAW image is an uncompressed image. All of the color and light information that you need is stored within the image. A JPEG image is a compressed image. It takes what you shot and compresses it into a much smaller file and leaves you with the ability to make limited edits because it’s already been done! Most of the information is already gone! Imagine that you are a painter. A RAW image is like a canvas. Your subject is there, you’ve placed them in the location you want and you’ve nailed the lighting in camera. But what you do with that image is up to you! You can darken the shadows, you can change the colors of the leaves, you can make the sky appear more vibrant. It’s all up to you! A JPEG image is like a print. The painting is finished – it’s done. If you want to change it you basically have to paint over it! There are so many advantages to shooting in RAW, and there are so many articles out there on why you should be doing it, but I want to share with you some of the practical advantages to shooting in RAW that I have found over the years, starting with the most basic and leading to the most complex!
1. Shooting in RAW can save you from missing a moment!
My favorite thing about shooting in RAW is I don’t have to panic if I accidentally underexpose an image. It happens to all of us! Sometimes you’ve been shooting in one location and then you move to a much brighter location and forget to change your settings! RAW has saved me on more than one occasion! If you underexpose an image that you’ve shot in JPEG, you can brighten it up a little bit, but you’re actually damaging the file when you do that, and you can’t brighten it up a lot!
Below is an image that I shared on my Facebook page a few years ago! I was shooting and changed locations and forgot to adjust my settings. I almost deleted the image when I was going through the photos on my computer, but I decided to brighten this up and see what would happen. I am so glad now that I didn’t delete it, because I think this is such a cute moment! If I’d shot the image on the left in JPEG, there would have been no saving it.
2. Shooting in RAW gives you freedom with the colors in your image!
If you like your colors to be more vibrant, you can do that. If you want them to be more muted, you can do that. If you want them to be bold, you can do that! You can do almost anything you want with the colors when you shoot in RAW! It allows you to be more creative and find your style!
Since shooting the image above, my style has actually changed a little bit! But since I still have the RAW files, I can go back and change it if I want to! If you shoot in JPEG, you simply do not have that freedom because there isn’t enough information stored in the image! Here’s another way that you could edit the image:
You can even adjust the individual colors in an image. If your greens are overpowering, you can make adjustments with the HSL sliders. If there’s an orange color cast from indoor lighting, you can fix it!
3. Shooting in RAW gives you freedom with the light in your image!
Do you prefer your images to be dark and moody? Light and airy? You can do all of those things if you are shooting in RAW! There are just so many topics I could touch on here, but I’ll show you an example of a sunset photo! Great sunset portraits are hard to capture because the sun is just SO. BRIGHT. If you expose the image so that your subjects are perfectly exposed, then the sunset will be too washed out and you can’t save it, even in RAW (side note: it’s easier to save an underexposed image than an overexposed image! If you can’t nail the settings perfectly, it’s better to be too dark than too bright!). If you expose fully for the sun, then it often leaves your subjects too dark, so you’ll just have to go with a silhouette portrait (which can be cool!). What I do is try to find a balance between exposing for my subjects and exposing for the background and then bring the shadows up in Lightroom so that the subjects can be seen and do some adjustments on the sky so that you can see more detail! Here’s an example from one of my favorite weddings to date! Right after the ceremony we caught the most gorgeous sunset! It was going down fast, so we didn’t have a lot of time to capture these! I couldn’t set up an off-camera flash or any kind of light setup. That’s where my instincts kicked in and I just started shooting! The sun was gone after 2 minutes, so if I had taken the time to do all of that we would have missed it! Here is a before and after of what I shot in camera and what I delivered to my client!
Here is another example! One of my favorite places to shoot weddings is Pretty Place Chapel. But shooting portraits there is so difficult because everything is backlit! If you expose for the people, the sky is blown out. But if you expose for the sky, you can’t see faces! So I always bring a flash when shooting there. But even then, my images still require some tweaking to get them the way I want them. Here is a before and after image from Pretty Place. All I did was bring up the shadows so the people were exposed properly and bring down the highlights so the sky was not overpowering. Then I brought the exposure for the whole image up just slightly. And that’s it! Now it’s an image they will cherish forever! 
The bottom line is this…
Shooting in RAW allows you to be more creative!
If you are having trouble with RAW, my advice would be to stick with it! Invest in a great editing program like Lightroom and experiment with your editing! Once you’ve got it nailed down, I promise you won’t want to go back!
As always, e-mail me with your questions!
Happy Shooting!
– Christi
