Adobe Lightroom includes integrated RAW conversion tools which offer highlight recovery, post-shoot white balance adjustment and more. But as well as offering the potential for increased flexibility and quality, RAW files can introduce difficulties, inconsistencies and tricky decisions of their own.
Indeed, there are both pros and cons to shooting RAW:
RAW file pros:
• Certain camera settings can be modified later, notably white balance, colour, saturation and sharpness settings.
• RAW files contain a slightly higher brightness (dynamic) range than in-camera JPEGs and most RAW conversion software can recover this extra detail. It's particularly important for recovering subtle highlight detail.
• Sometimes converted RAW files show subtly better fine detail than in-camera JPEGs. This is particularly true with Canon EOS D-SLRs, as shown by the image below (EOS 400D in-camera JPEG vs RAW file converted in Canon Digital Photo Pro):
RAW file cons:
• RAW files are larger than JPEG files, so you won't be able to store as many on the camera's memory card. These days, though, high-capacity cards are inexpensive and this is seldom a major issue.
• If you use third-party programs like Photoshop to process RAW files, you will not get the same custom colour settings as the camera provides, or exactly the same colour reproduction. For example, pictures you take in the camera's black and white mode will appear in colour in a third-party program because these camera/maker specific settings are ignored.
• In-camera JPEGs sometimes offer better or more accurate colours than third-party RAW converters do with the RAW files. This is because the in-camera processing is precisely tuned to that particular camera's sensor and firmware.
• Makers' own RAW conversion software will preserve the camera's colour settings but may not offer the same highlight recovery and other features of third-party programs.
• It can be difficult to incorporate the makers' own RAW software into your workflow if you're using Lightroom or Aperture, say, unless you carry out the conversion before importing your pictures (which sacrifices much of the flexibility of RAW files).
• Each new camera brings a new and unique RAW format, and it typically takes weeks or even months for third-party software vendors to introduce support for new cameras.
• Different RAW converters produce different results, in much the same way that old-fashioned film developers did. You may find a particular converter does a great job with one camera make, but does less well with another.
• RAW files enable you to postpone some picture settings (e.g. white balance) indefinitely. This is not always a good thing because it's easy to fall into the trap of constantly re-processing files to see if you can improve on the result, or never quite settling on a 'finished' version.
• RAW files are not suitable for distribution. You might be able to open that particular format with your conversion software, but others might not. For publication, circulation or display, you do have to convert them to another format first.
