Photography basics – Benefits and drawbacks of shooting in RAW format

The benefits and drawbacks of shooting in RAW format as compared to JPG are:

• RAW format has a higher dynamic range which allows you to recover lost highlights and shadows in post processing
• White balance, sharpness, contrast, colour saturation etc can be adjusted and can be reverted back to their original settings without compromising image quality. Any changes made to JPG are permanent.
• Chromatic aberrations (colour fringing) can be corrected when the RAW file is converted to JPG
• Easier to keep the RAW file and convert it into JPG after making adjustments to the same file instead of keeping the original JPG and making a copy every time adjustments need to be made
• RAW takes up about twice as much space as JPG
• RAW requires more processing power from the camera, which means a drop in continuous shooting

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