Should photographers save their digital photos in RAW format or JPEG in their camera? Many photographers are unsure which digital photo format has the best image quality.
However, most digital photos end up as JPEGs for printing or web display. The real choice is where to process the RAW image data from the digital sensor. Should photographers do it in the camera as part of the picture taking process, or save the RAW image data and process it later on a computer using specialist software, such as Adobe Lightroom or DxO Optics Pro.
Saving digital photos in RAW format is not a magical recipe to give instantly better photos than saving as a JPEG photo in the camera. Many photographers claim the JPEGs from their camera look just as good as the RAW images, and in some cases better. They unintentionally are misleading themselves, and others, because they are not completely wrong. In ideal lighting conditions digital cameras produce JPEGs with little or no difference in quality to those from RAW files.
