I remember the first time I saw the infamous phrase: “I shoot RAW” brandished across photography YouTuber Jared Polin’s chest. I couldn’t miss it! And from then on, I did just that. And you know what? It changed my photography forever. My time spent in Adobe Photoshop increased tenfold, I spent all my expendable income on portable hard drives and memory cards, and my computer slowed down to a sluggish crawl as it tried to process all that extra data. I jest. Well, kind of…
We’re told again and again to shoot RAW, and it’s hard to argue with the evidence. I’ve had shoots in lurid lighting conditions saved because I could alter the white balance in post. The same goes for the odd blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where I’ve been forced to ‘spray and pray’ in less than ideal lighting conditions. And although it’s taken time and effort to rewrite the wrongs in Adobe Lightroom Classic, I’ve ended up with an image that would have been resigned to the bin had I captured it in JPEG. And more recently, advancements in AI noise-reduction software have breathed new life into ancient images I once deemed far too noisy to ever see the light of day. Would I go back to shooting JPEG? No way!
