- Hi there.
Hey, my name is Dan Scott.
I am an Adobe certified instructor
and I've been working as a professional retoucher
and a creative professional for about 16 years now.
Kind of balancing professional work
with teaching that whole time.
I've won multiple Adobe teaching awards.
And recently, I crossed over 1 million students
for my online courses like this one.
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All right. Raw versus JPEG.
Raw's evil twin is JPEG.
There's nothing wrong with the JPEG.
And often, people will shoot both.
So, let's talk about the differences.
The real world, you have lots of information coming in.
There's lots of tone and color and okay,
all sorts of information that your camera
can absorb through the sensor,
way more than it can put
into the little rectangle that is your image.
So, it's gathering loads of it,
and that's what you're doing.
You're adjusting all the settings
to see what of the information you want to keep
and what you want to throw away.
And that's what you do when you hit click on a JPEG.
You decide, you make a decision on the color,
the exposure, the lights, the darks,
the highlights, what you're going to do.
Like this image here,
if I make this video, you can shoot raw video as well.
So, if I make this like super dark or super light,
I probably want it somewhere in the middle like this.
So, you make those decisions.
You take a snapshot and that's great.
You've got it, you're done.
What raw does is it actually captures more information
than that little rectangle can,
that you can see on the rectangle.
It's like going back in time.
You can open up your raw image and go,
actually, I want to change my exposure.
I want to make it darker or lighter.
Or somewhere in between or mask parts out.
Mask me out, so that the background's darker
and the foreground is lighter.
So, it gives you more information to work with.
You can only ever see the one rectangle,
but you can kind of go forwards and back
and find the parts that you want,
exaggerate different parts.
So, is that a good example of what a raw...
Let's just...
I'll show you in Lightroom.
I'll show you some good and bad examples of raw versus JPEG.
All right.
So, you can play along.
And in Lightroom, I'm going to open up my photos tab
and I'm going to add some photos.
And what you'll see is in the Exercise Files,
there is a raw folder, O2 RAW.
And I wanted to bring in everything from this folder.
And what you might notice
is that there's actually only two images,
a JPEG and a raw version of it.
Same photograph. Yeah, two different formats.
And you're like, I can see JPEG.
That's not raw. That's mixed up raw, ARW.
Every camera manufacturer
actually has a different extension for all.
It's not a generic one.
The generic one is DNG for a digital negative.
It is still a raw file
that just called something different.
Nikon like have NEF for our Nikon raw file.
Clearly, that is Sony, ARW.
Cannon have like CRW and CR2 and CR3.
So, you'll get used to whatever your camera raw file is.
It'd be right next to the JPEG. (chuckles)
It'll be something.
I'm going to bring in all four of those.
I'm going to bring it into an album.
I'm going to put it into None album.
Just going to dump ours into Lightroom.
And depending on yours, okay, it'll probably default
to show me all the photos that have been put in just now.
Or you can see all the photos that are in Lightroom.
I'm going to look at the ones just now to tidy it up.
And let's got these two.
These two, these are really good examples.
So, there's my JPEG and there's my ARW.
So, let's open up the ARW version, the raw file.
Double click it.
And I'm going to go to my settings.
And all I'm going to do is drag the exposure.
It's a cool shot, I love it.
But let's just say you want to go back in time
and you're like, actually, I want to bring in some of the,
look, surprise, loads of information.
Okay, that was potentially lost,
that is all in and around here.
But let's do the same thing to the JPEG.
So, down the film strip,
if you can't see the film strip, click on this.
Go to the JPEG version.
How do you know it's the JPEG version?
Because we started on the raw format.
It's not super easy.
You can go to the information option down here.
That's the JPEG version.
That, my friend, is the raw version, JPEG raw.
Can you see it there?
And that is the eyeball there.
So, I'm going to go back to editing.
I'm going to go back to this first one.
And I'm going to say do the same thing with my JPEG.
No problem.
Look, here it comes, here it go.
Ooh. (laughs) It's there.
But it's just not as good.
There's just not as much information captured.
JPEGs, you'll get away with a load.
And you can do some amazing things.
Just shooting JPEG, you can make some adjustments.
It's the big adjustments that you might want to do
that you just can't do in a JPEG format
and you need raw.
Let's do the same with this one.
Which is which.
I'm going to hit my little i down here.
This is the JPEGs first, and my raw file is second.
So, I'm going to start with my raw file
and I'm going to say edit, exposure come all the way up.
I'm not fixing that photograph,
but I'm like, hey, look at all that.
Some ugly looking cars down there. (chuckles)
You probably don't want that, but hey, let's say we do.
We need the ugly looking cars.
I can drag it all the way up.
And then, I can click on this same one.
Okay, JPEG, it's the same size.
Dimensionally is the same quality shot.
There's just not as much information in there.
You're like, well, that looks all right.
What's wrong with it?
Same, same.
Let's have a little look at comparing the two.
So, we do caveman comparing.
Let's zoom in.
So, we've learned the shortcut
Command + plus or control + plus on a PC.
So, do that a few times.
A few times, I did it about four.
You heard the clicks, four or five.
And then, nothing selected.
And just click and drag this little hand.
And let's find, I don't know, some bits.
Let's look at this building here and bit of the trees.
And if I just click on this other, the raw version,
it will kind of comparably go to the same place.
It's pretty clever that way.
Look at all the information in here
and it takes a little while to process.
So, wait, but you can see all this.
There's no color, there's no real tone.
It's still grainy, 'cause it's...
You can't go back and change the ISO,
but look at all the information
that it did capture amongst the trees and the cars.
These are the cars that we definitely need.
They're actually all right.
Look at the Audi badge. Let's have a look at that.
It's just a smoosh (laughs) JPEG format,
so you don't always need it, but it's handy to have.
And if you can shoot it, shoot in raw. Awesome.
Even better, shoot in raw and JPEG.
You'll find most cameras shoot both,
so that if you do just want to go quick and easy
and just use JPEGs, awesome, you got 'em.
But if there's that one photograph there,
you're like, ooh, I wish I could get into those,
into the bushes a bit better
or see some of the internal parts of the image,
look at that versus this one.
Ugh.
Ah.
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