RAW vs JPEG - Why it MATTERS!

all right today we are talking about jpeg versus raw what's the difference what are they which one should you be shooting and and why i'm gonna break it down as as simple as possible so today's gonna be a really basic look at the two and then we're gonna jump on the computer look at some side-by-sides i'm gonna show you exactly what a raw file can do and exactly what a jpeg file can do and if this video helps you guys out if this helps you understand this do me a favor hit that like button below that helps me out a ton and a huge thank you today's sponsor micro center micro center is a super rad retailer with 25 locations all around the country we have one here in southern california up in tustin it's just awesome to go into a place we don't do that so much anymore we pretty much go online we find things where we try to figure things out on our own and then we buy them we order them online and we try to put them together again all by ourselves whereas with micro center you you go into the store you talk to someone they've got a really knowledgeable staff you sit there you say i got this camera what sd card do i need or what are my options for sd cards or i have this camera here's the sd card i'm shooting what computer do i need to be able to process those files or what hard drive should i be using to make this all work together and make my raw workflow seamless check them out at microcenter.com and see if there's a location near you again there's 25 locations around the country right now hopefully hopefully one near you okay jpeg versus raw you've you've heard the terms you you kind of understand them but let's just break it down super simple a jpeg is you telling your camera take the image process the image and then compress the image save it into a small file so i want you to take the image maybe add some sharpening add some saturation make it make it look pretty and then shrink it down as much as you possibly can file wise whereas a raw image is you telling your camera take the image take all that information don't process it all don't touch it and then save it as a very large file because again i want all that information so when i go on my computer later i still have all that information because i'm gonna process the file okay so a raw image has has more information it's a larger file size and a jpeg image has less information but it's already processed and compressed which seems nice right but how much of a difference does having that extra information make i went to the beach i shot some images last night at sunset let's jump into lightroom and i will show you exactly the difference between raw and jpeg all right here we are in lightroom and i have i have four different images the raw and the jpeg version of them all right so let's jump to this image here so here again here's the jpeg and here's the raw arw is a sony raw file and jpg is my jpeg file and let's just see how much how much extra information is actually in the raw file versus the jpeg the jpeg image 5109 is this file is 10.3 megabytes if i go up one to the raw version of the same image 85.7 megabytes that's a massive difference that's that's huge there's so much more information in that raw file than in the jpeg and you're about to see how that comes out in editing so let's go back here to the jpeg and here's this file again very very overexposed we pretty much mainly exposed for the rocks here and the sky went overexposed because of that so let's hit the j key and what that's gonna do is pull up our highlights and our shadows so if i went over here to this image and with j turned on you can see all my pure blacks are in blue in this image all my pure whites are in red let's just grab exposure and just crank it down see what happens to that sky and you can see it gets it gets weird there's it's kind of just making everything darker it's it's not really changing the actual exposure as much as it's just saying that area darker whereas if i go over to the raw image and i grab the exposure same image just the raw version and i start pulling it back there is a ton of detail in that sky again switch over to the jpeg version this is what the darkened jpeg sky looks like and here's what the darkened raw file sky looks like that is totally totally different so raw vs jpeg with highlights the raw recovers them much much better than the jpeg can if in a jpeg image you have any part of your image that goes pure white or even is is really on that high end of white like 95 to 100 white yeah there's there's not much information there and then once you hit pure white again at 100 it's it's just gone there's no information that i can pull back from the whites of a jpeg once it's pure white it's gone let's look at the shadows and to do that we're going to go over here to this very underexposed image here's the raw file we'll zoom in it's pretty much black there's nothing down there and on the jpeg you can actually see it's a little bit brighter on the jpeg super interesting but a little bit brighter on the jpeg let's crank it up and we're going to expose for those rocks i'm going to pump the exposure way up here and switch over to the raw file we're going to pull the exposure way up here and then let's zoom in on just that rock right there all right so on the raw file you can see it's pretty noisy down here but still a lot of detail really well defined rocks still good kind of roll off from from brights to shadows in here and jump over to the jpeg version and you can see there's really loss of definition a lot of loss of definition in these rocks tons of of color noise coming in down here a lot of weirdness i'm going to crank them up even a little bit more yeah you can just see there's so much detail in the raw image still there's still so much information in those shadows where in the jpeg there's there's not as much information in the shadows it's kind of just taking what's there and it's it's brightening it it's like it's kind of just doing something you would do in photoshop to say i want to take this image and make it brighter whereas on the raw file there's information that that's not showing on the original image that you look at you just look at the image and you go oh it's dark but there's a ton of information that it's captured in those shadows and just by lifting the exposure boom we can pull that out so that on the raw and that's the j a lot of color casting too you can see even down check out this bottom rock here when i jump to the jpeg you see these weird colors going on through here that is super odd looking so the images that are too bright the raw image is able to recover a ton of information from the highlights and on images that are too dark the raw image is able to recover a ton of information from the shadows but the third benefit of shooting raw and maybe maybe the most important that i i think because it really comes into coloring the image and really giving the image the look is is white balance and on a jpeg image white balance is baked into the image again jpeg is a final image it's a processed image the raw image white balance not baked in at all it is infinitely adjustable in post let me show you what i mean this image pretty decently exposed straight out of the camera i'm going to give this a little boost we'll boost some shadows here but check out temp and tint sliders they're just both at zero and it's because they don't have a kelvin value they don't have a white balance value lightroom is just kind of saying yeah here's the picture do you want me to make it warmer or cooler or more magenta-y or more greenish so let's try to make this look like a real sunset like it actually looked it it was very it was very warm red sunset so if i add 20 of temp in here and it now gets really really green so let's let's pump up the magenta back into the scene that's looking all right i would say that's pretty close to what i was seeing there that day it was it was a little warmer it was a little more pink but unfortunately if i do this i get this weird casting all over the beach i don't want that on the jpeg i would probably push it about that far that's probably good right there and now on the raw file you're gonna see that my white balance is infinitely adjustable and it's applied in a different way on the jpeg image it's it's a global thing it's just kind of taking the jpeg and going more yellow more yellow more yellow whereas on the raw it's it's actually adjusting the white bounce as if you shot it in a warmer white balance or if you shot it in a cooler white balance now my temp and tint sliders are an actual kelvin number so my kelvin here is 5859 let's go ahead and just bring that up a little bit do some exposure stuff real quick i'm gonna bring my tint up bring my temperature up wow that is looking super super nice this is much closer to what it actually looked like while i was there it was a very warm very pinkish sunset so if i zoom in on these people here the coloring looks normal everything looks pretty normal this is it looks like actual sun hitting the rocks just like i saw it so what else really comes down to is that raw images give you more flexibility in post you have all the information to do the processing yourself whereas a jpeg has much less information therefore you have much less flexibility in post okay so obviously raw has a ton of benefits what are what are the cons to shooting raw why why wouldn't you want to shoot raw well number one is file size and those file sizes can get huge now in this example i was shooting uncompressed raw so that's why my file sizes were 83 megabytes normally i shoot compressed raw which brings my file size down to 44 megabytes but again 10 megabytes versus 44 megabytes i have way more information on that raw file but those raw files take up more sd card space they take up more hard drive space they take longer to transfer and back up on my computer and it takes more processing power to be able to edit those images but with sd cards coming down in price with hard drives coming down in price with with how fast our computers are these days and how fast those transfer speeds are these days to me it's still totally worth it to shoot raw even though the files are way bigger and it's more to deal with that one time or two where where you really need a raw file you you shot something it was in the moment you go oh gosh that was such a cool moment but my image is super over exposed or my image is super underexposed and and you know oh i shot it in raw let's get it back on the computer maybe i can save it that moment alone is worth shooting raw and that's it hopefully that helped you guys out if it did hit the like button below and then later down the road when you mess an image up and then you recover it because it was raw come back to this video and comment below and be like david thank you so much for convincing me to shoot raw i saved an image that i wouldn't have been able to if it was jpeg all right i'll see you guys later uh hit subscribe i'm gonna have more videos about the zv1 oh and a whole holiday gift guide thing coming up because yeah that's the holidays alright see you soon you

Channel: David Manning

Views: 30,288

Keywords: David Manning, David Manning Tutorials, Photography, Cinematography, Learn Cameras, raw vs jpeg, raw or jpeg, jpeg vs raw, photography tutorial, learn photography, camera raw, raw file, photography tips, raw vs jpg, raw vs jpeg comparison, learn photography for beginners, learn photography in 10 minutes, raw photo, raw file format

Id: 991_VEkVfJQ

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020