This week a friend and photo enthusiast asked a question, “I know a person who knows more about photography than me, and he says I might want to look into shooting RAW photos. I asked him why and I didn’t really understand his answer. What are RAW photos, and should I be taking them?”

To understand RAW, you also need to understand JPEG. Both are types of files captured and saved by better digital cameras and smartphones.

When a camera takes a picture, it is capturing the light reflected off the scene through the lens. The light from the raw image is absorbed by the photo sensor and a corresponding data file is created.

There is a ton of information captured, and you don’t need all of it to make a good image.

If your phone or camera is set to save the photos as JPEG images, the RAW image file is processed and compressed and saved in the JPEG format.

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is an image format that’s compressed as it's saved. You can set differing levels of compression to shrink the size of the data files, which also decreases image quality, while hopefully still producing a nice photo.

When your camera is set to save photos as JPEG files, the RAW data is not saved.

RAW photos contain the entirety of the data captured by the sensor, without processing. The files are larger, and they aren’t even an actual picture file. To see the image, you’ll need software that can read RAW image files; Adobe Photoshop is a popular option. Adobe Lightroom is another more consumer-friendly option.

To use the RAW images, you’ll need to process them. I’m not saying it’s difficult, but it is a step that most people don’t really need to master.

If you’re old enough to remember shooting pictures on film, shooting in RAW is the modern equivalent of developing your own film and printing your own pictures. You can learn to do it, and you may love it, but you may learn enough to figure out you’d rather not bother.

But if you are a photography geek, and want to get the most out of your images, by all means, shoot raw and get yourself a processing app and make some pictures.

It’s a cool hobby.

Note, some cameras can shoot in a mode called RAW + JPEG, which actually saves the RAW photo along with the JPEG version. It’s the best of both worlds, but you’ll need a lot of storage to save all those files.

There is plenty to read online about shooting and working with RAW images. If the topic interests you, Adobe’s website has a lot of good information.

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