The following is written specifically with wedding photographers and high end printing in mind. Sports photographers and those planning on printing on newsprint shoot jpegs because of the medium used, and the fact that no politician or soccer player ever looked at a photo and complained their wedding gown is the wrong colour or their make up doesn’t look right 
One of my former brides approached me recently and mentioned that a friend who is getting married was told by several newer photographers that it doesn’t matter if they shoot jpegs for her wedding as they are just as good as RAW photos. This encapsulates the lack of understanding by newer photographers who do not know what they are talking about. The only person advantaged by not shooting RAW for your wedding is the photographer. To me, anyone who shoots weddings in jpeg format is telling you that they do not care about your wedding and do not understand the science behind RAW verses jpeg, which gives RAW a distinct advantage especially for weddings. I hope this article helps photographers understand the science, advantages and ease of editing that makes RAW the only choice for wedding photographers.
Advantages of RAW.
Bit Depth. Jpegs are 8 bit files. The number of bits affects colour and tonal depth. With an 8 bit file each pixel has 256 levels per channel. 12 Bit RAW files have 4,096 levels per channel. Some cameras (like mine) shoot in 14 bit which gives 16,384 levels in each colour channel. Yes you read that correctly 256 levels verses 16,384. Now remember, jpeg shooters say shooting in jpeg is as good as shooting in RAW. 256 levels per colour channel is as good as 16,384? Not in this universe.
At the time of shooting a camera shooting RAW saves all of the information to the cameras memory card. A jpeg photographer lets his camera to arbitrarily throw away 3840 levels (or 16,128 if compared to 14bit RAW) before they have ever seen the image. If the camera gets the metering or white balance wrong their ability to fix an image is severely curtailed. Where this really shows itself is in subtleties in colour or in variations of fabric textures and skin colours. If a photographer starts editing photos in Photoshop everything they do while adjusting the image LOSES information. With a jpeg you have a lot less information to lose, or put another way, each adjustment loses a greater percentage of information than editing a RAW file does. In fact you NEVER lose information from a RAW file. More on that in another point. What can happen all too quickly, is that graduated tones quickly posterize. This means smooth tonal transitions get lost very quickly for jpeg shooters. Bad idea!
WHITE BALANCE: Ever taken a photo and the white balance is out. Your white wedding gown is yellowish or your friends faces look greenish? This is a white balance issue. If you have shot in jpeg you are really stuck. Any adjustment in photoshop LOSES information FOREVER and due to your tiny tonal depth you want to lose as little information as you can. When you shoot RAW it does not matter what your white balance is set at as it only affects the preview jpeg embedded in the file, not the actual file. This is important as most cameras don’t get white balance dead on most of the time. I am much better doing this than my camera so I do it after the shoot for every image
Non-Destructive Editing: Here is a secret many people do not know. Photo editing programs NEVER change a RAW file on your computer. They keep the adjustments in a separate file (sometimes called “sidecar files”) so that what ever you do to the RAW image, the actual image is never adjusted! With a jpeg, everytime you save a file you lose information! Do this too many times and you end up with a degraded image super fast.
Future Proof Photos: Jpeg images are cooked in the camera. Future editing degrades the photo. Because RAW files are NEVER altered on your computer, they can be edited 10 years from now with ALL of the advantages of that future technology. So right now a photo may be edited in Photoshop 5 and look good. Ten years from now when we are using Photoshop 17 or whatever we are up to, it will render even better photos from the same RAW due to the advantages of new technology.
Colour Space: Jpeg shooters need to decide whether to shoot in the AdobeRGB or the inferior sRGB colour spaces. With RAW it doesn’t matter. The in camera colour space is only applied to jpegs. This means bringing a RAW file into Photoshop you can use the ProPhoto colour space. Prophoto offers a phenomenally large gamut for editing, meaning it is MUCH harder to clip colours, shadow and highlight areas.
Exposure latitude: RAW files offer an enormous advantage of exposure latitude over jpegs. This goes back to 8 bit jpegs verses 12 or 14 bit RAW files. Skies need not be washed out, or if someones flash is fired at the precise moment you are shooting available light, thereby blowing your photo out so it looks white, or if your own flash fails to fire and you have a very dark file, you need not worry too much as with RAW the file is probably recoverable.
What are the Disadvantages of RAW?
- It takes the photographer more time to edit. That’s why you are paying them though, so no problem. Also todays computers crunch RAWs nearly as quickly as jpegs so this argument is pretty much dead.
- RAW files are about 10x bigger than jpegs so you need more storage. Hard drives and storage cards are cheap so not a problem.
That’s it!
My own thoughts are that there are no excuses for a photographer to shoot jpeg for anyone’s wedding. it is likely more reflective on their inexperience than anything else.
If you are a photographer and would like to have tuition on RAW editing let me know. I do offer training. Life is too short to offer mediocre work and remember to have fun.
