It would be easy to tell people “Raw is better, shoot in Raw”.

It may be of a better quality, but it’s not for everyone. JPG is a standard format, and because of it’s universality, it’s understood by almost every application these days. Photoshop, Aperture, Picasa, even Microsoft Word… they can all open up a JPG file. Almost all the photos you see on the internet are JPG files.

The advantage of this standardization is that a JPG is easy to share. If you email a picture to someone, it’s best to email a JPG, and they’ll be able to easily open it up for viewing. For sharing on the web (like eBay, or Flickr) it’s going to be converted to a JPG form. JPG is also fine for making small prints, even though it doesn’t technically have the same high quality as Raw due to being compressed.

…and that’s the downside. JPG is a compressed file format. Without going into the details of how compression works, it’s enough to know that when you shoot a JPG, you are literally throwing away image data when you take a picture in order to make the file size smaller (and thereby allow you to get more pictures on a memory card). This process is called compression.

When you resave a JPG file (if you’ve been editing it) you will sometimes recompress it, meaning that your compression is accumulating and making the picture look exponentially worse. Many newer photo editing applications feature “non-destructive editing” to avoid this.

Raw files come in two flavors. They can be uncompressed files, or they can be “virtually lossless”, meaning that they are compressed, but it’s extremely minimal (to the point of being not visually noticeable), and it doesn’t accumulate. Raw files are named differently from different manufacturers. Canon uses the CR2 extension. Nikon is NEF. Olympus calls theirs ORF. And so on.

There is no standardization with Raw. Raw files are different from manufacturer to manufacturer, and even from camera model to camera model. In other words, the Raw file from a Nikon D70 is different than that from a Nikon D80, or a Canon 5D. Therefore, the software you use to open and edit your files needs to understand your camera in specific.

Adobe (the software giant) is trying to market a practical Raw standard they call DNG, which they provide a free converter for. The converter lets you turn your Raw files into DNG files. There doesn’t seem to be much benefit from doing this, other than converting your files to a format that may outlast your Raw file format, but it’s a gamble.

While all this may seem a little troublesome at first, once you have a workflow in place, it will pay off. I shoot everything in Raw these days. I edit in Raw, I print from the Raw file, and I archive in Raw format. I only convert a Raw file to a JPG if I want to email it or send it to the web.

Raw files store the entirety of the raw pixel data seperately from the image optimization settings on the camera. Those settings are embedded inside the image and are editable in software, which will draw the image using those settings.

For example, if you shoot the image using DAYLIGHT white balance but it was actually shot under FLOURESCENT lighting, you can make this adjustment using software after the fact and the software will redraw the raw photograph using that new information.

If that had been a JPG, you could make color adjustments like that, but would sacrifice a lot of image quality to do it, and it likely wouldn’t be as easy an edit.

Raw

• Better quality
• Easier and more flexible to edit
• Larger files

JPG

• Smaller files
• More universal
• Lower file quality and tougher to edit

If you shoot RAW files at all (they’re called NEF on Nikon cameras and CRW on Canon cameras) then you likely have a system for dealing with them. Because RAW files are unstandardized, the RAW format will vary from company to company, and from camera to camera. Nobody has really settled on a “standard” RAW file yet, which upsets a lot of photographers. RAW will continue to remain a non-standard format, so long as the camera company continues to stand behind the format, and there is no good reason to standardize.

But it would be nice to just be able to see those pictures in Windows, and open them in a preview pane without having to open Photoshop or Capture. That’s where the new Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for XP comes in. It’s a fairly small installation, which resembles the Microsoft Picture and Fax Viewer, but is designed for a multitude of RAW files.

You can download the viewer at the Microsoft site.