JPEG vs RAW: Which Should You Use?

If you spend any time playing with your camera you might have stumbled across the photo settings. Deep within those settings are things like image size, image ratio and even image format. And, depending on the complexity of your camera, it might have both JPEG and RAW formats for saving your photos.

If you have absolutely no intention of editing your photos after you take them, then you can stick with JPEG, no questions asked. However, if you do want to edit them, or think you might in the future, then it’s time to learn the difference between JPEG and RAW.

The Basic Difference Between JPEG & RAW

To help keep things simple, let’s first talk about the most basic difference between JPEG and RAW files.

JPEGs are smaller and use a compression algorithm to save space.

RAW files are a lot bigger and save as much information as possible. You will often find pros using them with their full frame cameras!

This means that you sometimes lose information in JPEGs and it is certainly a lot harder to recover that later. RAWs are the opposite and keep as much information as they can within the limits of your camera and your camera settings when you took the photo (more on that later).

In terms of editing, this also means that it is a lot easier to work with RAWs and recover the detail, color and contrast you had while you were shooting. See the images below where you can see a huge difference between a JPEG edited and a RAW.