Awesome sunset!

On my way home from a shoot last night, I observed a truly marvelous sunset. Here are some photos taken from my car window while driving down the 101, yeah, I'm a real photo nerd! Pretty soon the CHP will be putting out ad campaigns for "Don't shoot and drive"...hehe

As I was looking at these images, I thought it might be interesting for my readers (I know you're there!) to talk about JPEG shooting versus RAW. I'll try to do this without getting too techy....hopefully you'll find it interesting!

Professional cameras have the ability to capture imagery in a few different formats, the most common being JPEG. A JPEG is a completely finished file. You can make adjustments to the brightness and contrast by opening it in Photoshop or another after-capture type program, but each time you make adjustments and open and close the finished file, you loose a bit of image quality.

I prefer to shoot in RAW. RAW files are unfinished - meaning they do not have the .jpeg extension. Since they are unfinished, we can go in and make any adjustments necessary - shooting RAW gives the ability to adjust the exposure by up to 2 stops, adjust the white balance for different lighting conditions, adjust the contrast, color saturation and the list keeps going.

Shooting RAW offers a lot of pluses for the end product, but it does take more time to process. I believe there is major upside for the little downside we call time, and that is the quality. RAW files capture millions of more colors than a finished jpeg file. This makes the file size larger and the quality premium!

Below you can see both files types - can you guess which is JPEG and which is RAW? the last one is "digitally enhanced" in photoshop.

So there you have it, a mini photo lesson on why I prefer to shoot RAW and why it's better. Some may argue, but I know what offers the best quality and even if it takes a bit more time in the post-production, we like to give our clients the best!