For years, I thought moving from JPEG to RAW was an obvious upgrade. Someone told me I should be shooting RAW, so I did. For years and years.
RAW editing can be fun. There is something genuinely creative about taking an image apart and deciding for yourself how it should look. Sometimes, with enough work, you can produce something better than the camera’s JPEG.
But often, I can’t.
Camera manufacturers have spent years developing their own image processing: colour science, sharpening, noise reduction, contrast and all the other mysterious ingredients that make an out-of-camera JPEG look just right. Much of that is effectively secret sauce. You can spend an hour trying to get the colours and sharpness right from a RAW file, only to look at the embedded JPEG and think: why was I fighting this? The camera already did a better job.
Then there is the workflow. RAW files are huge, and RAW photography tends to create a process: import, edit, export, organise. I have dozens of perfectly good RAW files sitting on my server that I keep meaning to edit someday. Someday rarely arrives.
These days, I have gone back to JPEG. I can sync photos directly from my Olympus or Sony cameras over their built-in Wi-Fi into Apple Photos on my Mac, iPhone or iPad. From there, most images need little more than a crop. If they need more work, I use Photomator, which is fast and powerful and works across all three devices. The edits update directly in my Apple Photos library and sync everywhere almost immediately.
The result is that I can edit photos whenever I have a few minutes, wherever I happen to be. Photos are ready to share quickly. Most importantly, I stay on top of them. There is no longer a growing backlog of RAW files waiting for the mythical day when I finally sit down and process them all.
JPEGs take less space, look excellent, and fit naturally into the way I actually want to use my photographs. HEIC offers similar advantages where it is supported.
I started out shooting JPEGs. Then I was told I should shoot RAW, and so I spent years doing that. Now I have come back to where I started, but with a much better understanding of why.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding: “…and know the place for the first time.”
That feels about right.