Which is best RAW or jpg

Jpeg has been the standard form of compression used by digital cameras right from the very beginning. The camera captures the image, applies the exposure and white balance settings and then compresses the picture to a Jpeg file. This is then stored on the memory card. This system works fine, and if you are a professional photographer who hits the perfect settings every time, Jpeg is good enough, but only if you wish to represent your images 100% faithfully.

Well of course even professionals don’t get it right every time, if pictures need fixing in your image editing software then pictures taken in RAW format will give you the best chance of success. The RAW files are captured in a different way. The camera captures the image, then ALL the information is compressed into a lossless data file, and stored on the memory card.
It is true that image editing software is quite happy for you to make changes to JPEG images, but the possibilities are limited. During the compression process all of the unused data was deleted. That image data is lost.

During the creation of the RAW file all of the data was maintained which gives us the ability to adjust the white balance, exposure, saturation and sharpness after the picture is transferred to the computer, so even if the shots were hurried, RAW gives the best chance of coming away with usable pictures.

In this comparison the original shot is purposely underexposed. Both images had the exposure adjusted, the RAW file during conversion and the JPEG using the exposure tool in Photoshop. This is a clear demonstration to one of the advantages in shooting RAW.

There are some downsides to the RAW format. Each RAW file is approximately four times larger than the JPEG equivalent. This causes several small problems. The memory card will fill up quicker and when archiving your shots to CD, more discs will be required. Each camera produces it’s own version of RAW. Although conversion software will be included with the camera, if you use a third party software converter it may take a while for the update to include new RAW versions, and then of course this is only be any good on your computer, you may not be able to open the files elsewhere. Even with these issues from the point of image quality and editing, RAW can’t be beaten.