What Format You Might Want To Save Digital Photos In

What format do you recommend I save photographs in? Like raw or jpeg? I don’t know the difference.

so it depends on what you wanna do with your photo!

if you want to post it right away, you want a jpg; raw files aren’t web-ready and can’t be viewed by various devices easily.

if you want to take a bazillion photos and keep all of them too look at regularly on your phone, you want a jpg; raw files are much, much bigger sized files and will fill up your storage way more quickly, and they don’t actually look good out of the box.

if you like to post-process your photos on your phone or computer, you might prefer raw; jpg files contain only a fraction of the image data that a raw file does (hence the size difference) and it’s much harder to adjust them in ways that look and feel like professional photography.

however: processing a raw file is not optional – you can’t use it till it’s processed, and processing them is a skill you’ll need to give yourself time to practice. They also can require specific software to process them; famously lightroom and photoshop are the industry standards, and they’re pretty $$$, but I bet folks can drop some cheaper options in the notes!

I never shoot only raw, personally, because I love to share photos with friends ASAP, but sometimes I do shoot jpeg & raw together. If you have never tried out shooting and processing raw photos before, this is my recommendation.

Also, shooting raw is great but it’s super not necessary to do if you don’t want to process all your images by hand. There’s a bazillion reasons to take photos different ways, and “convenience” and “speed” are really good ones.

but also: post processing can be fun as heck. try it out! see what you think!