WILL PHOTO MECHANIC OPEN RAW MK IV SERIES

However, if you set your camera for best quality JPEG (meaning a larger file but less compression), it’s rare that you’d see any issues from that. Does that mean a loss of image quality? Yes. Why?įirst, JPEG, by its very nature, means some image information is lost through compression. That unprocessed data is what makes RAW photos special, and it gives RAW files some advantages over JPEGs. That’s so the camera can provide an instant preview of the photo on the LCD (instead of having to process RAW data in-camera on the fly). Most people don’t realize it, but that’s why most RAW formats also include a highly compressed JPEG inside the RAW file. Remember, RAW data is not a photo yet because it’s just 1’s and 0’s that haven’t been processed to create a photo.

Pretty much every digital camera – and even some smartphones – let you set them to save that RAW data, either in addition to a JPEG or as the only file. That DNG gives me the ability to do non-destructive editing. And after I edit that NEF in Adobe Camera RAW, I save it as a DNG, which remains about 24MB. If I choose to have it write a RAW file instead (what Nikon calls a “NEF”), that’s about 24MB. A high-quality (low compression) JPEG, on the other hand, only 7.8MB. If it wrote a TIFF to the card, that would take up 73MB of space. Here’s a good example of the size differences depending on format, from my Nikon Z 6 (a 24-megapixel camera). JPEG was created as a universally accepted method of compressing digital images, and while cameras used to also offer the capability to save images as TIFFs (as well as JPEGs or RAW files), few now do. Because early digital devices had very limited storage, the only way to make digital captures feasible at that time was to compress that TIFF into a JPEG before saving to memory (and then automatically deleting the TIFF). That process results in a finished image file, a TIFF, which can be quite large (about three times, in megabytes, what the megapixel count is). By default, most devices process the image, creating an picture that can be viewed and used right away. When any digital device captures an image, it’s actually recording light striking a sensor and then doing one of two things: either processing that data into an image immediately, or just saving the RAW data to the card.

But before I go into why, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what JPEG and RAW mean. Yes, it’s a fact that RAW gives you more flexibility when editing photos, but does that mean JPEG is bad? No, and that’s why I’ve been shooting mostly JPEG lately. Because it was the best PICTURE, regardless of format. But you know what? Her photo, JPEG and all, won that day’s judging. The host looks like he’s about to faint, and you’d think they were going to kick her off the show right then and there.

WILL PHOTO MECHANIC OPEN RAW MK IV SERIES

In fact, there’s a pretty funny scene in Adorama’s 2016 Top Photographer series (at the 7:34 mark in this link) where one competitor has to admit she forgot to set her camera to RAW and shot JPEG instead. If you’re serious about photography, then odds are you’ve either heard people say you should shoot RAW.

Will photo mechanic open raw mk iv