Is your photographer shooting RAW?

Most people who buy a dSLR camera to just snap the family and friends don’t care about complicated settings that need to be done in manual mode or all the post-processing of images on expensive PC’s using expensive software. Most people who own a dSLR are not professionals and like using the camera in Auto Mode. There is nothing wrong with using Auto, it is there for people who don’t have time and are shooting for themselves and are happy with what comes out of the camera, but when you are a hired photographer the rules change.

Is there any benefit to shooting in RAW?

Many people don’t even know about RAW, never mind wondering if it is useful. RAW is the unprocessed base image captured by your cameras sensor before it is processed internally and then compressed to the lossy JPG format. JPG images are bad for editing (bad bad bad). A jpg image to start off with (in Fine mode) is already 15% less quality (or more) than the original RAW due to compression. Once you edit a JPG and re-save it you lose a further 15% quality compounded onto the original 15% (more than 30% loss!). These are the simple terms and I am not going to bore you with the complexities of how JPG works.

In the example image the top image is a JPG image from the camera…the image below it is a RAW processed image. When you are hiring a photographer, make sure they are shooting RAW as it gives them the ability to do proper processing. Photographers not shooting in RAW are lazy as it does take a big longer.

NOTE: There are certain situations in which even Professional Photographers would shoot in JPG mode, but these cases are rare and will NEVER apply to shoots such as Weddings.