Great Escape Publishing

Posted August 15th, 2014 by Bonnie Caton & filed under Travel Photography.

Are you a brownies-with-walnuts kind of person, or a brownies-with-NO-nuts kind of person?

When you set your camera to shoot in RAW, the images you get out of it are unfinished, like un-baked brownie batter. But all of the “ingredients” are there and you can adjust them as much as you want in a processing program like Lightroom. Your final product looks exactly how you want it to look.

But if you set your camera to shoot in .jpg, the images are already finished — like baked brownies. The photos “pop” more than RAW images do. But your camera did all of the decision making for you. If they’re too bright, too dark, or the color balance is off… it’s too late.

The thing is, you CAN process a .jpg image. But you can’t do as much with it as you can with a RAW image.

For example…

Here’s how an un-processed RAW image and .jpg image look, side-by-side:

The RAW image, on the left, is darker and has less color and contrast than the .jpg.

But they both have the same major issue. Overall, they’re both gray and uninteresting.

If I take the RAW image into Lightroom, I can fix the sky, as well as the overall exposure and contrast, to make it look like this:

Yowza! That’s better.

But I can’t fix the sky on the .jpg image, because the data is lost. Those brownies are already baked.

I can up the contrast and the saturation, but processing a .jpg image will introduce issues like compression much more quickly than it will with a RAW image. If you’re shooting for fine art, that might be ok. But for stock, an image with compression issues will get rejected.

When you make your own brownies, you get to choose if they’re chewy with butterscotch… fudgy with macadamia nuts… or cakey with a hint of mint.

If someone else bakes them for you, it’s easier for you. But you’re stuck with whatever they like. You can’t add chocolate chips after the fact, or take out all the walnuts.

— Bonnie

Bonnie Caton
Creator, Breakfast Stock Club

P.S. Premium Members: I made you a quick video tutorial to show you how I got the RAW image above to look better in Lightroom. You’ll find it on your Premium Member Page, under the “Bonus” tab, here.

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