Digital Home Thoughts: JPG vs Raw: Get it Right the First Time

"If you shoot hundreds or thousands of images in a day shoot JPG and don't worry. The quality is the same for almost all intents and purposes as raw, and the raw files would take gigabytes or tens of gigabytes and resultant hours to download, convert, catalog and burn to backup CDs. In fact, if you shoot this much then JPG can give better quality since attempting to shoot this much raw will constipate your workflow and you could miss making some images entirely as your cards fill up. You'd always be running out of memory cards or time waiting for the access light to stop blinking. If you love to tweak your images one-by one and shoot less than about a hundred shots at a time than RAW could be for you. In fact, if you prefer the look you can get from raw (it may be different from JPG in some cases depending on software) you can let your computer batch process images and save the results as JPGs, too. I almost never shoot anything in RAW, and when I do I never see any difference for all the effort I wasted anyway. (I can see differences if I blow things up to 100% or bigger on my computer, but not in prints.)"

A very interesting, and controversial article on JPEG vs. RAW shooting. I have to admit that after reading it, I tend to side with the author. One of my chief objections to my shooting in RAW is the sheer hassle that the format represents. For instance, when I got my D200 I thought "Ok, it's time for some RAW shots!" and I happily loaded the images in ACDSee Pro, which I knew had RAW support...and promptly saw nothing. It couldn't load my images! I found out later that they'll be releasing an update this month that will add D200 RAW support - the D200 RAW files are different than previous cameras, so ACD Systems had to engineer special support for the format into the product.

Can you imagine if this was the case with JPEG? What a nightmare it would be! I also shudder at the thought of trying to keep archives of my RAW images and the same files in JPEG format. I already need 16 GB of storage for my photos, adding RAW into the mix would make it even more cumbersome. I certainly think RAW has its places, and I'm not saying it's a bad idea for some people, but for me, JPEG is the way to go in most instances. I haven't completely given up on RAW - I plan on experimenting with RAW shooting once ACDSee Pro adds D200 support. Give the article a read and tell me what you think.