RAW vs JPEG: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Be Shooting?

The post RAW vs JPEG: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Be Shooting? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Sime.

RAW vs JPEG

If you’ve poked around your camera’s menu settings, you’ve probably come across an option that says something like “Image Quality” or “File Format” — and two choices staring back at you: RAW and JPEG. Most beginners shrug and leave it on JPEG because, well, it’s the default. But understanding this one setting could genuinely transform the photos you’re able to produce. Let’s break it down in plain English.

What actually is a RAW file?

Think of a RAW file as a digital negative — it’s all the data your camera sensor captured, completely unprocessed. When you shoot RAW, your camera records everything: every detail in the shadows, every highlight, every colour nuance. Nothing is thrown away.

The trade-off? Your camera doesn’t do anything with that data. RAW files can’t be posted to Instagram straight out of your memory card. They need to be processed in editing software like Adobe Lightroom, Capture One, or even the free Darktable before you can share them. That’s extra work, but it’s also where the magic happens.

So what does JPEG do differently?

A JPEG is a finished product. The moment you press the shutter, your camera applies sharpening, contrast, colour, and noise reduction — automatically — and then compresses the image down into a smaller file. It’s ready to share immediately.

The downside is that your camera makes those decisions for you. And in doing so, it throws away a lot of data to achieve that smaller file size. Once that information is gone, it’s gone for good.

Why does this matter when editing?

This is where the RAW vs JPEG debate gets really practical. Let’s say you take a beautiful landscape photo, but you slightly underexposed it — the image looks a bit dark. Here’s what happens in each format:

With RAW, you open the file in Lightroom, drag the Exposure slider up a couple of stops, and the detail that was hiding in the shadows comes right back. The image still looks natural.

With JPEG, you try the same thing. The image brightens, but the shadows turn muddy and noisy. You might also start to see banding — those ugly stripes of colour where smooth gradients used to be. That’s because the data you needed to recover the image simply isn’t there anymore.

RAW files typically give you around 4 stops of exposure recovery in either direction. JPEGs? About one stop, if you’re lucky. That headroom is the difference between a recoverable mistake and a deleted photo.

The colour and white balance advantage

Here’s another thing beginners often don’t realise: white balance is completely non-destructive in RAW. Shot your indoor portraits under warm tungsten light and forgot to adjust white balance? No problem — in Lightroom, you can fix it perfectly after the fact with zero quality loss.

In JPEG, changing white balance in post is genuinely editing the image data. You can nudge it slightly, but a major correction will shift colours in ways that look artificial and degrade quality.

“But my JPEGs look great straight from the camera!”

They might! Camera manufacturers have put enormous effort into their in-camera JPEG processing, and modern cameras produce lovely JPEGs. If you’re shooting fast-moving events, sports, or documentary work where you need to hand off photos quickly, JPEG is completely legitimate and used by professionals every day.

The question is: are you getting the most out of your camera, and do you have the editing control you need?

If you’re learning photography and want to understand how exposure, colour, and light work together, shooting RAW forces you to engage with those decisions in post. That process is incredibly educational. You start to see what the camera captured versus what you created — and that gap is where you grow as a photographer.

The storage and speed trade-off

RAW files are big. Depending on your camera, a single RAW file can be 30–80 MB, versus 5–20 MB for a JPEG. If you’re shooting hundreds of frames, that adds up fast. You’ll need bigger memory cards, more hard drive space, and longer backup times.

RAW files also slow down your camera’s burst shooting because there’s more data to write to the card. If you shoot action or wildlife where you’re hammering that shutter button, this can matter.

Many cameras offer a great middle-ground solution: RAW + JPEG. You get both files simultaneously — the JPEG for quick sharing and preview, the RAW if you want to edit properly later. Storage hungry, but flexible.

Which should you choose?

Here’s a simple way to think about it:

Choose RAW if you care about getting the best quality from every shot, you enjoy or plan to learn editing, you shoot in challenging lighting conditions, or you’re working on portraits, landscapes, or any photography where the final edit matters.

Choose JPEG if you need photos ready to use immediately, you’re shooting high-speed action and need fast burst rates, or you genuinely don’t want to edit and your camera’s JPEG output already makes you happy.

Choose RAW + JPEG if you want the best of both worlds and don’t mind using the extra storage.

Getting started with RAW

If this has convinced you to give RAW a try, here’s how to start: change your camera’s image quality setting to RAW (or RAW + JPEG), and download Adobe Lightroom (there’s a free mobile version) or the free desktop app Darktable.

Take a photo in tricky lighting — something with bright windows and shadowy corners is perfect — and spend 10 minutes just moving sliders around. Watch how much detail you can pull back from areas that looked completely lost. That moment of “oh, wow” is what turns most people into permanent RAW shooters.

Got questions about RAW editing or what software to use? Drop them in the comments below — we’d love to help.