Should I Shoot in RAW Format?

Yes! As a “serious amateur”, you might find that you occasionally (?) misinterpret a scene – maybe the white balance is wrong, exposure is off, or you missed the distracting objects in the frame. If you shoot in RAW format, you maintain the greatest control with respect to your post-processing options. As opposed to JPG , where the camera makes some processing decisions for you and chooses to throw some of the image data out in favor of a smaller file size, RAW files contain all of the original image data. When working with RAW files in your image processing software, you will have the opportunity to correct the white balance, tweak the exposure, recover highlight and/or shadow detail, and crop/clone out distracting objects with little loss of image quality.

Yes, RAW files are big and quickly eat up SD/CF cards. However, memory cards are relatively inexpensive – particularly when compared with the prospect of lost opportunity to save a potentially great image.

Additional Resources:

JPEG vs RAW

Why RAW?

RAW Shooting

JPEG vs RAW

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