P#18 Q2C: Is it Best to Shoot in RAW Format?

Everyone Uses RAW Format

Tony Sweet: Everyone I know shoots everything in RAW format.

Audri Lanford: Can you shoot in JPEG when you're doing HDR, or should you just avoid it?

Tony Sweet: You don't need to avoid it if that's all your camera can do. Photomatix will certainly process JPEG files, no question about that. Just make sure that you have exposures going at least two stops under and at least two stops over and be on a tripod.

If your camera only shoots JPEG, you can do that, but it won't be your highest quality image because RAW format is your largest, most complete file that will give you your best final result. That being said, you can certainly do HDR in JPEG. Absolutely.

Audri Lanford: I noticed that when I moved over from shooting in JPEG to RAW format, it made such an enormous difference.

Tony Sweet: It's night and day. A lot of wedding photographers shoot in JPEG just fine. They make prints of that because it's a high quality jpeg and if you resave it over and over again, it retains the quality.

At weddings you just don't want to process 2000 RAW files, so they'll shoot high quality JPEGS. If they know what they're doing, it gets proper exposure. It's much faster that way for them.

But for anybody else, I think RAW format would be the preferred format of choice -- absolutely.

Audri Lanford: The other downside of RAW, of course, is the fact that it is a disk space eater.

Tony Sweet: The RAW files are fairly small. They're about 14 mg or 15 mg when they're compressed from the D3. What takes up space is when you convert them to a tiff. Then they're like 59 Mb, so that's what takes up space.

Audri Lanford: I think mine are between 12 and 14 mg. When you take a bunch of them, it starts to add up.

Tony Sweet: That's right. "Just keep buying hard drives" is the battle cry these days.

To Sum Up

While it's possible to shoot HDR photos in JPEG, it's not the best choice. So unless your camera does not have RAW capabilities, Tony recommends shooting in RAW format, because RAW provides you with a much better result. Just make sure you're prepared with enough hard drive storage space.