Should I be Shooting in JPEG or RAW?

[Hallow's Maiden]

Nikon D80 - What should I be shooting in? JPEG? RAW?

For the histogram i can get on my screen.. I googled it and it said it could be very worthwhile to keep it on the screen... should i? Should the colors be somewhere in the middle?

[Travis]

shooting raw gives you better latitude in post production... however, the latitude is useless to an uninformed user...... raw files are larger and require an eventual conversion to jpg before they can be shared with the public...

my advice would be to start with jpeg and focus on your in camera skills.... then once you have a solid foundation.... start shooting raw and learn how to maximize your imagery.. you can do both at once but the learning curve will be way longer..

in most situations, the histogram will provide useful information regarding the tonality of your image... it certainly doesn't hurt for you to learn and observe it..

[tomorrowstreasures]

Travis. really good insight? (slash) advice for HM!

[AcadieLibre]

I suggest shooting in RAW. I advocate it because it does give you the ability to correct photos afterwards. Honing your skills when shooting also should coincide with your ability to do post-processing work. Yes the files are much larger but the ability to get inexpensive storage seems to nullify that as a reason these days. Even if you just convert them to JPEG and keep the RAW file as a back up for now, when you do get the ability to use the RAW file to its full potential you can go back into your files and work on photos you may have considered lost that are one of a kind that you cannot repeat. I am a strong advocate for shooting in RAW, it has issues, would be nice if they standardized it but you can always go with Adobe DNG. Just because you are learning is not a reason to shoot in RAW. It just one opinion, I think Travis makes some valid points, in the end it is your choice and just giving you another opinion.

[tirediron]

I'm going to side with AcadieLibre on this one. Shoot RAW, convert to .jpg and save the RAW files for later.

[morgan]

my camera has an option to get both raw & jpg. When i made the switch from jpg to raw, i used this setting. i now feel comfortable to shoot in only raw. i wish i would have used the setting to capture both from the start. I love editing my raw images now that i know how to do it. i'll never go back!

[PKMax]

I'd shoot in RAW to begin with, I originally shot in jpg because I hadn't really understood what the point of RAW was, but shooting JPG loses a lot of information in the photo that you can't recover. it's also a lossy compression, so it loses some individual pixel information by merging pixels with neighbouring pixels to make up areas of colour if the pixel colours are similar enough.

the way in which the camera produces the JPG means that whatever settings you had switched on at the time in the camera, like a vivid mode, or sharp mode etc, these actually modify the image to form the JPG, where as if you shoot in RAW these settings are only stored in the RAW file as what the camera was set to, so it's a more versatile image.

I have on occasion gone back to an old JPG file that I've taken to try and process it, and it's a lot harder to play with and I wish I'd shot it in RAW at the time. I also found that some software won't play with JPG and requires RAW for some things, like some HDR software if your trying to do Single Photo HDR etc.

[JoeMezz]

shooting raw gives you better latitude in post production... however, the latitude is useless to an uninformed user...... raw files are larger and require an eventual conversion to jpg before they can be shared with the public...

my advice would be to start with jpeg and focus on your in camera skills.... then once you have a solid foundation.... start shooting raw and learn how to maximize your imagery.. you can do both at once but the learning curve will be way longer..

in most situations, the histogram will provide useful information regarding the tonality of your image... it certainly doesn't hurt for you to learn and observe it..

I agree with Travis.. shoot jog until you outgrow that and then shoot raw.

[krphotogs]

Allow me to add my thoughts on this.... I think it depends on what you shoot, if you are going to shoot a hundred shots and post them all to a web-site for friends and family to see - shoot jpeg you will go crazy try to PP them. If you are going to take a hundred shots, and cull them down to 10 or 15 really good ones - shoot in raw.

Jpeg - being an 8 bit file has a much smaller number of colors that can be displayed versus a raw or tiff file (sorry, I have heard aobut 16 bit jpeg but no experience with it). Every time you save a jpeg file by definition you are degrading the quality of the image. Work in raw then your last step is write the jpeg file.

I agree with the one post who commented that you can develop your PP ability while working on your photographic skills. But, if I get to be really good at taking photos one day I may switch back to jpeg - but right now it saves me every now and then.

Kevin

[tirediron]

One further point against .jpg. It's a lossy format, that is: Each time you open, edit and save a .jpg image, you lose a bit of information. If you go back and make a number of edits to the same image as a result of bad planning, or a change of mind, you're going to wind up with a significantly degraded image.