Ok, so you’ve gotten yourself a digital SLR. After reading the owner’s manual (yes, Sput, people do that) you think to yourself, “what’s this RAW setting and why should I use it?” Simple question, yes, but it has generated a whole lot of heat (if not light) in the “pro-sumer” folks and probably some in the pro ranks as well.

The best place to get really acquainted with at least one answer to the question is over at Ken Rockwell’s site (yes, that is his real name). Mr. Rockwell is both extremely knowledgeable and extremely opinionated–two traits that make him one of my favorite reads (He’s also a Nikon shooter, which is helpful to me). The one question that he never answers to my satisfaction is, how is RAW different from JPEG? After re-reading his piece it occurred to me that the answer was pretty simple: RAW allows you to choose your conversion engine. Period. End of story.

What do I mean? Well, I had a digital photography instructor once tell me that shooting JPEG was “doing the first edit in the camera.” That seemed to make sense at the time but, in the end, I’m not sure it identifies what’s happening. Really, when you shoot JPEG what you’re doing is you’re choosing to convert the raw CCD/CMOS info captured by the camera using the camera’s firmware. When you shoot RAW, you’re choosing the conversion of whatever your favorite RAW processing software provides. What does this mean for you and me? Well, it means that you need to choose RAW or JPEG based on what you’re doing. For example, if speed of processing is my main issue, I’m going to choose JPEG. As Mr. Rockwell states, “Cameras do this processing in hardware much faster than your computer can do it in software.” True. However, if I want the absolute maximum latitude in how the CCD/CMOS data is processed, I’m going to shoot RAW. Shooting RAW is rather like shooting film–if I want to have it cross processed when I get it developed, I can. Shooting JPEG is much more like shooting slide film–it pretty much is what it is and if you screw up, your image is toast.

I shot a ton in the mid-80s and I can still remember the articles talking about how the pro documentary (a.k.a. photo-journalist) guys shot “chromes”–slide film. I never understood it as I absolutely needed the exposure latitude afforded me by film. When I came back to photography after a 15-year layoff I needed that latitude in digital photography as well, shooting RAW almost exclusively and only switching to JPEG when I needed to conserve space. Why? Because I wasn’t all that confident in my ability to really nail the exposure. Shooting RAW gives me roughly 2 stops of exposure latitude. That said, I’m going to go through the exercise of shooting JPEG for a month or so just to see if I can get the type of images I want with the camera doing the conversion. Early indications are that I can (exposure compensation is your friend…learn to use it for the good). Still, I’ve grown quite attached to the look of images converted by Capture One LE, so I imagine I’ll shoot both when the time and space allow.

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