RAW Wedding Photography
RAW refers to the way data is stored on a camera’s memory card. We might have the option of storing the photo in a few different formats. These various formats use a different amount of space on the card. A highly compressed format will use less space on the card, so you can have a greater number of total images. But this compression means you lose some of the photo’s fine detail. Often this loss of detail is so slight it doesn’t really matter. But we probably won’t know this in advance.
RAW is a format that uses minimal, if any, compression. It retains all the detail but uses a fairly large piece of memory. As memory cards are quite cheap these days this hardly matters. If we want more photos we just buy more memory cards. The big advantage of Raw photos is that we have more options when we process them. If, for example, we want to zoom in on a small part of the image the RAW file allows us to do this with minimal loss of quality. A compressed file might be limited here- we cannot zoom in as the image become pixilated. A compressed file might also be limited in dynamic range, so we might find that the contrast can only be adjusted by a small amount.
At first, some alternatives to the RAW format look better. This is because formats like JPG do some automatic colour correction when they store the image. Often this is quite good – the processing will balance the colours and brightness levels for you, often satisfactorily. But the problem is you are stuck with this automatic procedure. If the JPG doesn’t do it the way you want, you are stuck with the wrong look for your image. Raw, by comparison, keep all the data of the image, which you can then process as you see fit. This means you have to make the decisions manually, but you have far more options.
We should usually take wedding photos in RAW format. This allows us greater flexibility when processing and preparing the final images.
Other Formats
There is still an important place for compressed formats like JPG. Most internet sites use JPG images. So once we process an image from RAW we might convert it to JPG when we load it on a website. This will load more quickly than a RAW file.
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