PUBLICATION CENTER

By Tom Hauenstein

Over the course of the Great Output Seminar Tour, one of the most common questions I’ve been asked is whether you should capture in RAW or JPEG.

If you have attended the tour already, or plan to during one of the remaining eight stops along the way, you have learned (or will learn) that I’m an advocate of getting everything right during capture. This will save an exponential amount of time on the back end during the editing process, increasing both your efficiency and profitability.

Future Shock

That said, it is my opinion that you should capture in RAW. I do not recommend this simply because it allows you to correct mistakes made during capture more easily. Instead, the main reason I’m a proponent of capturing RAW is that you end up capturing as much information as possible.

Shooting in JPEG limits the amount of information you capture because it is ultimately and finally limited to a specific color space. Most in-camera options allow you to select sRGB or Adobe 1998 as a color space. If you capture in JPEG and capture colors outside of these color spaces, they will be moved into one of these color spaces automatically, and you will never be able to get those back.

You should get as much information as possible when you shoot because technology changes and improves so fast in our industry.

For example, the color gamuts of printers are increasing with every generation, and I assume that most labs will soon be updating their technology to accept files in Adobe 1998 or larger.  Let me explain this further with a real-world example…

Let’s say there are two wedding photographers shooting the same image. One photographer shoots RAW and the other shoots JPEG in sRGB, and both send the image to their respective labs.

Let’s also assume that the image has a lot of colors that fall out of the sRGB color space. The RAW photographer would convert his RAW image into sRGB knowing that he will be sending it to the lab.

Therefore, both photographers will get very similar results from their labs because it is the same image in the same color space.

Assume five years have passed, and the bride and groom want some anniversary reprints made. We’ll assume their labs now accept and reproduce files in the Adobe 1998 color space or larger (Pro Photo).

The photographer who shot in JPEG is still limited to sRGB and will get the same image he got five years ago. This means that the first photographer cannot take advantage of advancements made in technology.

The photographer who shot in RAW can take his file and convert it to Adobe 1998, getting a much better replica of what was actually captured that day.

This same example could be done with printing in-house since the color gamuts of printers are increasing steadily as well.

By capturing in RAW you give yourself the opportunity to take advantage of technology and color gamut improvements.

Finally, there are tools like Aperture and Lightroom that enable the user to edit and sort through RAW files easily, and memory has become very cost-effective, so those reasons have gone out the window, or the viewfinder, if you will.