JPEG or RAW, when/where/why

[rsn]

I was bored and had just finished reading the millionth post on JPEG's and the usual crowd came in with "I shoot RAW because...." I used to be in this crowd. So decided to ask Deepseek (free artificial intelligence software), when to use JPEG and when to use RAW, below is the response:

"Of course! This is a fundamental question in photography, and the answer boils down to a trade-off between convenience and creative control.

Here’s a simple breakdown of when to choose JPEG over RAW.

The Short Answer
Use JPEG when you need speed, small file sizes, and convenience, and you are confident in the camera's ability to get the look right in-camera.

Use RAW when you need maximum creative control in editing and want to salvage the highest quality from challenging lighting situations.

JPEG Explained (The Finished Product)


A JPEG is a fully processed image. Your camera applies settings like white balance, contrast, saturation, and sharpening according to your picture style presets, then compresses the file, discarding some data to make it small.

When to Use JPEG:

1. For Speed and High Volume
Sports & Wildlife: When you need to shoot long, continuous bursts at high speed, JPEGs allow your camera's buffer to clear much faster, letting you capture more action without the camera slowing down.

Events & Photojournalism: When you need to deliver images quickly or transmit them directly from your camera via FTP, the small file size of JPEG is a massive advantage.

2. For Convenience and Small File Sizes
Everyday & Casual Photography: For family vacations, parties, or social media posts where absolute perfection isn't critical. JPEGs are ready to use straight out of the camera.

Limited Storage Space: If you're traveling or have a small memory card, you can fit many more JPEGs than RAW files.

Quick Sharing: JPEGs are the universal standard. You can take a picture, pop the SD card into any device, and instantly view or share the image without any special software.

3. When You Trust Your Camera's Processing
You've Nailed the Settings: If you are skilled at setting the correct white balance, picture profile, and exposure in-camera, a JPEG can look fantastic with little to no editing needed.

You Don't Enjoy Post-Processing: If you dislike spending time on a computer editing photos, JPEG delivers a finished product. Many modern cameras have excellent in-camera processing that can produce great colors and tones.

RAW Explained (The Digital Negative)
A RAW file is an unprocessed, uncompressed dump of all the data captured by the camera's sensor. It is not a finished image; it's a data file that requires software (like Lightroom or Capture One) to "develop" into a viewable image like a JPEG.

When to Use RAW:

You Plan to Edit Heavily: You have immense flexibility to adjust white balance, exposure, shadows, and highlights with minimal loss in quality.

Challenging Lighting Conditions: In high-contrast scenes (e.g., a backlit subject), a RAW file retains far more detail in the shadows and highlights, allowing you to recover blown-out skies or dark shadows.

Maximum Quality is Critical: For commercial, portrait, or landscape photography where every ounce of detail and dynamic range is needed for large prints or high-end clients.

You're Still Learning Exposure: RAW acts as a safety net, allowing you to correct major exposure mistakes after the fact.


Many cameras offer a mode where they save both a RAW and a JPEG file for every shot you take. This is an excellent option if:

You want the safety and quality of RAW for important shots but need quick, shareable JPEGs.

You can use the JPEGs to quickly cull through your images and only spend time editing the RAW files of the best ones.

The downside is that it consumes storage space even faster.

Final Recommendation
Choose JPEG for: vacations, family events, sports, journalism, or any situation where speed, convenience, and small file sizes are the top priority.

Choose RAW for: professional work, landscapes, portraits, studio photography, or any situation where you know you will want to edit the images for the best possible quality.

Think of it like cooking:

JPEG is a meal from a restaurant—ready to eat and consistent, but you can't easily change the ingredients.

RAW is buying all the raw ingredients—it takes more time and skill to prepare, but you have complete control over the final flavor.

 

[ahaslett]

They missed:

With RAW you can achieve higher exposures if you know how to correct for jpeg metering, and you can simplify your workflow by not having to understand the jpeg engines of every camera you use, or fiddle with jpeg settings while shooting.

You have to be an inexperienced RAW shooter to view processing as “correcting errors”. That’s a jpeg shooter view of RAW as a backup just in case. The film analogy also conceals rather than illuminates how digital photography works.

Remember AI distills a range of views rather than providing an objective truth.

I’m not trying to persuade anyone to shoot RAW. If I had to produce 2,000+ images from an event in a couple of hours, I’d learn how to use jpeg on the body I planned to use. Processing from RAW is easy. You mostly just copy the settings from image to image in a sequence and the controls are easier to use than menu diving on a camera. However, exporting the images takes a bit of time, quite a lot of time if you use heavy AI NR. That’s fine for 30-100 images, where you are exporting in the background, not so fine for 2,000+.

Andrew

 

[Cherry_F]

I was bored and had just finished reading the millionth post on JPEG's and the usual crowd came in with "I shoot RAW because...." I used to be in this crowd. So decided to ask Deepseek (free artificial intelligence software), when to use JPEG and when to use RAW, below is the response:

[../..]
Choose JPEG for: vacations, family events, sports, journalism, or any situation where speed, convenience, and small file sizes are the top priority.

Choose RAW for: professional work, landscapes, portraits, studio photography, or any situation where you know you will want to edit the images for the best possible quality.

[../..]

Sounds great.

But... how about shooting landscapes while on vacation?

___
Photography is so easy, that's what makes it highly difficult - Robert Delpire

 

[Ryan Schwartz]

I shoot RAW mainly because I don't want to deal with a camera's processing decisions. I have control over it - like how much noise reduction to apply.

Nikon's P900 is aggressive on noise reduction no matter the setting with only JPEG processing and the updated P950 with RAW is such a breath of fresh air. I can get much cleaner images out of the P950.

If I want something quick to share to social media (which I don't really use anymore), I will shoot JPEG then use a mobile app to get the photo off the camera onto the mobile device to share with the social media app.

 

[Larry_T]

Greetings. I think the DPR audience is highly skewed to shoot RAW, especially for nature, landscape, birds, etc. I shoot mostly street with a Nikon Z6iii and am very happy with a JPEG that I lightly edit and then post here or to social media. At best someone will spend 3-5 seconds on my image and then move on. For many of my photos I convert to B&W in post, I sometimes print at 5x7 or 8x10 at most. I keep looking for a RAW workflow but am not interested to spend hours at a screen. I am not opposed to RAW, I welcome suggestions in finding the right workflow to get an image that is as good as the tweaked JPEG out of my camera. Peace.

 

[Ysarex]

I was bored and had just finished reading the millionth post on JPEG's and the usual crowd came in with "I shoot RAW because...." I used to be in this crowd. So decided to ask Deepseek (free artificial intelligence software), when to use JPEG and when to use RAW, below is the response:

"Of course! This is a fundamental question in photography, and the answer boils down to a trade-off between convenience and creative control.

AI bunk.

For me it boils down to a trade-off between a best-possible-image-quality final result and a result guaranteed to be inferior to best. I'm going to go with best -- I only save raw files.

 

[AstigmaticOwl]

Having come up in the film world, I tend to think of JPEG as analogous to slide film while raw is analogous to negative film. Well, negative film if you could adjust white balance easily after the fact.

 

[WilyKit]

1. RAW + JPEG or RAW only.

2. Always.

3. Because all cameras' JPEG engines suck compared to PhotoLab, in terms of color accuracy, demosaicing quality and hence detail, contrast, sharpening, and denoising quality, etc. and it's possible to fix highlights that are often destroyed in the out-of-camera JPEG. Other than that, of course all kinds of other tweaks are possible, resulting in much better image quality.

With various cameras you can also re-do the JPEG file from the raw file with tweaked settings, or generate a JPEG later if you used RAW only.

Never, ever JPEG-only. I think it's insane to just toss away the "negatives".

 

[a_c_skinner]

Shoot JPGs. Expose for JPGs. Keep the raws. You won't get everything out of the raws you could but it will give you a bit of headroom for the highlights. For many subjects you can bracket exposures too.

 

[ishwanu]

If your camera's JPEG engine is crummy (as in only being able to apply a choice of inadequate sharpening or bad sharpening with halos - or only a choice of inadequate noise reduction or bad noise reduction with detail smearing), there's a reason to go RAW.

 

[A74Me]

I shoot both saved to different cards, unless i totally mess the exposure up or i have face hi-lights to recover, jpeg does the job. camera jpgs are hard to beat with modern cameras that you have tweaked settings in camera.

 

[bmoag]

Jpegs are the Kodacolor drugstore prints of the digital world.

You get what you're given.

It might be ok, but if its not you'll never know what it could have been.

And in jpeg world the drugstore tosses out the negatives.

Why anyone would invest in high end dSLR equipment, and even the lesser gear like I use, and not save the raw version of files is another of the many things I don't understand.

 

[J A C S]

Too long.

I shoot RAW only, and I am not a professional photographer.

 

[Leonard Migliore]

I was bored and had just finished reading the millionth post on JPEG's and the usual crowd came in with "I shoot RAW because...." I used to be in this crowd. So decided to ask Deepseek (free artificial intelligence software), when to use JPEG and when to use RAW, below is the response:

[../..]
Choose JPEG for: vacations, family events, sports, journalism, or any situation where speed, convenience, and small file sizes are the top priority.

Choose RAW for: professional work, landscapes, portraits, studio photography, or any situation where you know you will want to edit the images for the best possible quality.

[../..]

Sounds great.

But... how about shooting landscapes while on vacation?

I always shoot raw, even on vacation. I'm never going back to some of these places. I want to make sure I can get a good image and raw gives me more latitude for that.

The only downside is that I can't easily send pictures back to folks at home. But I have a phone for that.

 

[yardcoyote]

JPEG all the time, mostly because I like using the camera that way and I the results I get with it. Also, I am lazy.

 

[Ron Poelman]

Now from an dodgy El Cheapo opinion gatherer, not a fact gatherer.
This is a perfect demonstration of AI's ability to breathe life into the weakest of propositions depending on how the question was asked; trustworthy much?
Again, how tiresome ! doesn't begin to cover it.
Put it to bed for heaven's sake, no one was ever converted by yet another preach post.
Use it, don't use it, but spare us the never ending misinformation.

RAW is not hard.
RAW is not slower.
RAW can do things JPEG can't.
JPEG is not as safe as RAW.
It 'ain't either/or, it never was.

Enjoy your choice and as ever, run whatcha brung and show us the pics.

--
Ron.
Volunteer, what could possibly go wrong ?

 

[Bill Ferris]

So decided to ask Deepseek (free artificial intelligence software), when to use JPEG and when to use RAW, below is the response:

"Here’s a simple breakdown of when to choose JPEG over RAW.

The Short Answer
Use JPEG when you need speed, small file sizes, and convenience, and you are confident in the camera's ability to get the look right in-camera.

Use RAW when you need maximum creative control in editing and want to salvage the highest quality from challenging lighting situations.

That's a good summary.

 

[Ysarex]

I just went out on the patio and took a camera JPEG of my basil plants. I set the camera to auto WB and used the camera metered exposure which was good for the JPEG. +.3 is too light and -.3 is too dark so the camera selected the best exposure for the overall JPEG lightness. Here it is:


Camera JPEG

Now I could make the SOOC JPEG better by setting a custom WB and adjusting some of the picture controls. Assume I took the trouble to do that and got an even better JPEG. Assume I got the best JPEG the camera is capable of producing. Would it be hard for me to beat that JPEG saving a raw file? No. It would be trivially simple and take me a lot less time than the effort required to improve the SOOC JPEG.

So I went ahead and took the photo saving a raw file which I processed in C1, Here it is:


Processed from raw

I got the WB right and my JPEG has better tone response, but assume you could have tweaked those aspects of the camera JPEG. Is my version going to still be better? Absolutely, yes. Note the exposure difference between the two photos. I exposed more to get the raw file.. I exposed to use the full recording capacity of the sensor and the camera did not. I exposed a full stop more and that's 1/2 the sensor's recording capacity. The camera left 1/2 the sensor's recording capacity unused and there's nothing the JPEG shooter can do to remedy that. Exposing more to get a camera JPEG will produce disaster. Here's the JPEG the camera made from my raw exposure -- nuked to h*ll.


Nuked camera JPEG

Shooting raw with any of my cameras and I can expose more than the camera will expose to get a good JPEG. What I get for that is a better SNR and a better SNR = better overall image quality. I always beat the camera and with no more effort than to just set the best exposure.

 

[BAK]

When I started, I would just select a filter to put under the lens. Different filter, difference color balance.

Later I used color enlargers. Turned a knob on the box that held the light bulb, and that adjusted the color of the light that went through the nagative, and hit the paper.

Kodak made cards with sheets of filter material in an opening in the card. Look at the print through the filter in the card, and you would know what filter to put under the lens, or how to turn the knob.

Pretty easy, but time consuming.

BAK

 

[Howard V]

I started switching over from jpeg to raw, in 2010. I'm shooting raw + (fine) jpeg now. There are lots of possibilities from both, for getting images into final form. One bit of advice: it takes a beginner some time to personalize a raw workflow that ends with better images than in-camera jpeg. For many it's worth the time and effort. But I don't see it as required for becoming an accomplished photographer. I know a number of old veteran photogs who came over from slide film to jpeg long ago, and stayed there because their slide film exposure technique worked in jpeg (expose for the highlights, let the shadows fall where they may). Their work is very good.