Why wedding photographers use raw files?

Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is Paul, and today I want to speak about raw files. Why? For wedding photographers, it’s very important to always shooting raw. As you may know, digital cameras can shoot in two different formats.

First one, it’s a JPEG. It’s a compressed file. You can apply some adjustments to it, but when you apply them a lot, when you start editing the photos, they got messy. They don’t have enough information about the color, about the photo. So when you adjust them, colors got crushed.

But when we use raw files, these files have all the information captured by the camera. These files are much bigger than the JPEG files, usually around four times bigger. But these files can be adjusted in any way photographer or editor want. So in this case, when you’re on the wedding day, it’s very important to use raw files because during the day you have different environments.

You have wedding ceremony. You have wedding photo shoot with the bride and groom with the groomsmen, bridesmaids, different group shots. Then you have your wedding reception and after the reception you have your some kind of exit from reception.

So in this case, all these different locations may have different kind of light, different colored temperature. So in order to get a consistent picture color within all these different locations, it’s much better to use raw files because when you edit these files, you can adjust the white balance to each of these photos so they will look consistent.

Also, we as wedding photographers can shoot under different light conditions. So if you want to increase your exposure afterwards in the editing, it’s much better to do it using raw files because they provide much more latency of the brightness that can be adjusted. You can recover your highlights.

You can get some details from the highlights that are cleaving by default, but by the set exposure. Or you can recover your shadows and get some details from the shadows, not having just black pure black in your photos.

Also these raw files allow you to apply different kind of presets easily, so your photos will not get any kind of weird colors. Also usually these raw files, they have a better beat depths, so that means that they have much more color information in the files. So you have much more different views of the same color so you can adjust precisely to the colors you want to get.

Also, it’s good to save these raw files on your drives in your archive, just in case. You’ll sometimes in a few years, you may remember about one photo. If you still have a raw file of this photo but you want to apply different editing to this photo, you still can do it because if you will have only JPEG file with applied colors, applied preset, you will not be able to return to the default state of the colors and then apply your new preset or new way of your post production.

So guys, it’s always good to shoot raw and especially nowadays, all these hard drives get much, much cheaper. So you can save all your raw files not worrying about the amount of data you’re having. If you have any kind of questions, please let me know and see you the next time. Thank you very much. Bye.