Like many photographers I shoot RAW or RAW and JPEG, it all depends on what I am shooting and how.
Camera manufacturers spend time and money in researching, developing, testing, calibrating and building their camera systems to take advantage of the latest technologies.
So, if you only shoot RAW then you maybe missing out on the advantages of exploiting all the functionality that is built into your camera.
Things like
- In camera HDR
- Photo styles
- Post focus
- Creative filters
To name but a few, and your cameras Intelligent auto or scene recognition function, that analyses a scene, and the sets the best parameters for you to shoot with.
Buying an expensive camera and only shooting in RAW means that you are paying for lot of features and only using a small amount of your camera’s functionality.
And just becasue you are shooting JPEG’s that does not mean that you cannot do some creative post processing.
The picture below is an out of the camera JPEG taken on my Lumix G9.
And here is the final image
The image was taken into Perfectly Clear Complete to take advantage of their AI technology in post processing the JPEG and then into Luminar 4 for a quick sky replacement and use of some subtle effects, Mystic and Vignette.
I think the results are very pleasing and not a RAW file in sight!
My advice is to take the time to learn about your camera’s rich functionality and exploit the technology built into your camera.
It does not matter whether you are new to photography or a seasoned pro, camera manufacturers put all this technology in place to help us take better images, so use it.
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