For those photographers who are shooting using the jpeg format, here’s a pretty compelling demonstration of why you should change to a RAW format if you can.

Recently I took some car interior shots while the car was in being repainted. These were shots for my insurance company who, quite unreasonably I thought, wanted to have on file  some photos of the cars they insure.

Suffice it to say the shots were taken quickly with no real attention to detail.

With one shot the flash hadn’t fired and you can see the results below –  an interior that looks virtually black with no detail – but by tweaking the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw the shot was made passable.

As a comparison I wondered how a jpeg of the same image would perform if tweaked the same way and the results were quite dramatically worse. I wasn’t expecting the quality gap to be so big.

The amount of detail contained in the shadows of the RAW file which can then be brought out is phenomenal.

So, if you can shoot in RAW but choose not too, think about a change.