The Editing Workflow and Best Practices
Nearly all digital photos need some form of adjustment to make them appear as the scene did when the image was first captured - cameras don't see the world the same way as the human eye. JPEG files are processed and compressed in the camera while RAW files are not. That's why JPEGs often look better than RAW files once on a big monitor. But, in challenging light, such as in the burning tropical sun we see in the image comparison below, a JPEG file, on close inspection, will exhibit a number of flaws, such as lost highlights and blocked-in featureless shadows. Some photographers can accept this - but, if you wanted to see all the tones in the bird's foliage, for example, you would have to record it using a RAW file because it contains far more image data that can be recovered and processed than a JPEG file. JPEGs are '8-bit files' - these contain considerably less picture information than a 10- or 14-bit RAW file.
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