As soon a keen photographer buys their first Pro range digital camera they are faced with a choice: whether or not to pick RAW mode. They'll give it a try but the technical and time issues involved beat many and they go back to good old JPEG. That's often a mistake as RAW has a lot of advantages. Let's explore this further.

It's difficult to justify the time RAW takes. It's not the shooting - most never notice the extra time a camera takes to write RAW to a memory card. It's the post-production. Running the converter to get the JPEGs you need to share with family seems unnecessary. Is it? Couldn't you just shoot JPEG and be done with it?

The internal processor that takes the electrical signals from the image sensor is normally factory set to convert your images to JPEG. That's a great choice as its probably the most widely used image format in the world. It's hard to find a screen or printer that won't happily accept a JPEG. Before the JPEG is saved your camera will have color corrected, sharpened and compressed your image to make it almost idea to share with family and friends.

An issue with the conversion to JPEG is that detail is thrown away. The JPEG format assume you have everything in the image that needs to be shown on screen. Shadow detail that would be hidden in the darkness is simply dropped. Highlight detail that can't be seen at the saved exposure is discarded to save space. Even detail within the main parts of the image that can't be seen at 100% scale is often removed.

If you save your images in RAW format, everything the camera captured is there. Nothing is wasted. You can now go home, load your RAW editor and try as many different color corrections, sharpening routines and compression algorithms as you like. And the editor will not damage your RAW image in the process. It will keep the RAW intact and save the result as a new file. If your image editor understands your type of RAW image file you will be able to edit using the original data so that dodging the shadows or burning in a highlight is likely to reveal some hidden detail not visible until then. With JPEG all that extra detail is absent.

So we've discussed the Pros. What about the Cons? RAW files take up a lot of space on your camera memory cards. This means you may need to change cards more often and need more memory cards. Then there's the time it takes to transfer these large images from the camera to the memory card. Sometimes it takes so long that it reduces the 'frames per second' firing rate of your camera - that's no problem for most people but sports photographers may be better sticking with JPEG.