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RAW vs. JPG

by Arun Prabhu
(Manipal, INDIA)

I found your article on the above subject interesting. I will be glad if you can clarify certain issues.

I own an Olympus DSLR (E-410) with kit lens. I am a relative newbie with DSLR and have been editing my JPG pics with the Olympus Master Software.

You very well know that the software has a feature to edit both RAW and JPG files.

Even JPG files can be edited for sharpness, brightness and contrast, color tones, and saturation. You can even resize a file. By tweaking the tone curve a bit I have sometimes brought about a remarkable transformation in a pic.

In this scenario, is there a significant advantage in capturing a pic in RAW mode? The only additional features in RAW I find is the ability to correct exposure compensation and change the color temperature.



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Oct 21, 2016
 olympus NEW
by: Lora

My brother has also Olympus DSLR (E-410).
Aug 03, 2009
 Lossless Editing
by: Digital SLR Guide

Yes, you can edit both JPG files and RAW files to tweak sharpness, color tone and a variety of other image parameters.

But there are two main differences between editing JPG and RAW files that set these two file types apart.

First, every time you edit a JPG file and save it, you "lose" a small portion of the image information due to the compression that is applied to every JPG file.

While the compression reduces the file size, it also eliminates data - the more you edit, the more data is lost from the original file.

By contrast, editing a RAW file is "lossless": you can edit a RAW file 100 times (or more) and the source file will still have all the data it had when you first captured the photo.

The second main difference is that the same master RAW file can be "developed" in a wide variety of ways to create uniquely different images from the same source.

For example, a color RAW file can be processed to create intense saturated colors for one version of the image, and that same file can be converted into black and white.

In essence, you can create any number of radically different-looking photos from just one master RAW file.

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