Stefanus Prayitno Photography

Some of the questions that photographers often ask is whether to use JPG or to use RAW. Seasoned wedding photographers have developed a system to use JPG on some shots and RAW on the others. The purpose is to solely conserve memory space. On my Canon D30, RAW takes 8-9MB storage space, whilst JPG only 1-2MB (small fine).

Some of the rule of thumbs that wedding photographers adopt are:

1. Group photos, definitely RAW
2. Very high dynamic range photographs, use RAW (Raw got a lot more shades that the mere hundreds JPG)
3. for casual shots inside building with very low contrast, use JPG

In this article, I would like to point out why you should use RAW on group photos. Note that JPG vs RAW-convertto-JPG yields different results.

I will use the example of a not-as-expensive lens (but very highly recomended). In this photo, I use 17-50 lens from Tamron (approximately $350). I happened to shoot RAW & JPG, thus can do comparison like this.

Left is JPG, right is RAW. It is a cropped version of a much larger group photo on the above. Compare the sharpness of left and right photos. Now I agree that right photo, despite being sharper than left, is not the sharpest photo that you can get. But think about this being cropped from a much larger group photo and that this uses NOT L lens, and this did not use any studio lighting to help sharpness (only mere hotshoe flash).

I can we can conclude here that shooting group pictures in RAW format is the best option to getting the sharpest picture that you can get.

8-bit JPG only yields 2^8 = 256 possible tones. Whilst 16-bit RAW yields 2^16 = 65.536 possible tones. Thus you can calculate how magnificent the differences are.