RAW vs. JPEG

The discussion between wich file format to use has conflicted photographers quite a bit. Now like I mentioned, these are two different picture formats. As I was getting into photography, I really didn't find anything just laying out the facts between them, and their pro's and con's. So here go.

JPEG files are the more common of the two. And for quite a few reasons. To begin with, the pictures come out of the camera looking adjusted. Now what do I mean by this? Well when you shoot a photo in RAW, think of it like having the negative, or the full original info of the picture. EVERYTHING that is captured is stored. Now this brings up the next difference, file size. If a JPEG photo coming out of an 18 megapixel. camera is 5 megabytes, the RAW file will be approximately 25 megabytes. Which means on an 8 gigabyte card you will only be able to take about 260 photos in RAW.

So which is best? Well it comes down to a few things:

- The type of photography that you do: If you're just shooting some unimportant photos, and you do not  want to tweak them afterwords in an editing program, JPEG is best for you.

- If you have a small memory card, and looking to take many photos, shoot JPEG.

- If you have a big enough memory card, and are doing work for a client you can shoot whichever you     prefer, but keep in mind that you can also shoot in both formats.

With that said, in my opinion it is best to shoot JPEG and RAW. The camera will save the file in both formats. So if you would like to edit the photos, and have the originals for extensive recovery and flexibility, you can shoot RAW.