Why RAW? Lightroom’s HDR mode captures a lot more detail without looking weird. The image from the stock Camera app also uses the iPhone’s HDR mode. Lightroom gives much more pleasing detail in both the highlight and the shadow parts of the image. Look at the images on his site,, and you’ll see the difference. الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا - اللغة العربيةBirchler found that, without any tweaking (but using Lightroom’s HDR mode), Lightroom gave by far the best results. Southeast Asia (Includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) - English Selecting a region changes the language and/or content on. Noise reduction can be more effectively applied to a raw file than a JPEG.Shadow detail that is irretrievably lost in a JPEG can often be more successfully recovered in a raw file. The same is true of darker, underexposed images.In a raw file, even if the highlights appear to be completely white at first, it may be possible to adjust those tones and reveal highlight detail that is still present. Lost detail in overexposed highlights cannot be recovered in a JPEG.With a raw file, you have complete control over white balance when editing the image. With a JPEG, white balance is applied by the camera, and there are fewer options to modify it in post-processing.One of the main benefits of capturing a photo as a raw file is that the additional tonal and color data in the file offers more options, especially if exposure changes are needed. Raw has more options for correcting exposure issues For some images, this difference can be critical. The result is a file with far fewer potential tonal values than would be possible in a raw file of the same scene. The look of a JPEG image can be changed in an image editing application, but since it is a compressed format designed to yield smaller file sizes, a lot of tonal and color data has been permanently discarded during the compression process. Settings such as brightness, contrast, color saturation, and even sharpening may have already been applied. Here's a cooking analogy: a raw file contains the ingredients to make a specific meal that you can prep however you'd like, whereas a JPEG is that meal already cooked, and there is less flexibility in how you can modify it.Ī JPEG, even one that is straight out of the camera, has already been “developed” by the camera’s image processor. With more data stored in the file, there is more processing flexibility than a JPEG can offer. If the camera format is set to raw, no processing is applied, and therefore the file stores more tonal and color data. If the camera format is set to JPEG, this raw data is processed and compressed before it is saved in the JPEG format. When an image is captured in a digital camera, it is recorded as raw data.
The advantages of raw become clear once you start editing your photos in programs like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This choice can have a significant impact on the processing options and possibilities available to you. One of the choices you encounter on many digital cameras is whether to save the photos from your camera as JPEGs or raw files.