RAW usage up massively

November 7, 2009 @ 4:18PM

RAW usage up massively

By Daniela Bowker

There are tons of reasons for using RAW instead of JPG when you’re taking photographs. Your photos will be sharper, you will be able to unlock your camera’s full dynamic range, and you have a better flexibility over things like white balance.

It seems as if people are cottoning on in a big way, too – I ran a poll about 2 years ago about whether people were shooting in JPEG or RAW… And I re-ran the same poll earlier this month.

The changes are staggering…

2 years ago

Early 2007, 36% used Raw mostly or exclusively. 55% used JPEG mostly or exclusively:

Today

Today, a whopping 66% of you use Raw mostly or exclusively, and only 26% still prefer to shoot in JPEG:

Why’d this happen?

Hey, I think if you read the three articles linked at the top of this blog post, it’s pretty clear why I stopped taking photos in JPEG… But I’d love to hear about your reasons in the comments…

Comments

Anonymous

2 years ago

My main reasons for start shooting exclusively RAW were actually the ones said in the first chapter, especially with white bal and dynamic range.

Before moving to RAW I experienced some HDR-shooting, with poor results. I did really not find any common day use for HDR in my photography. It's a cool effect, but you have to be careful not to put it on every single scenery shot. Just like with this Dave Hill effect, IMO.

Now I have been using only RAW for about one year. I shoot everything in RAW, photogigs, customer projects, things home, personal projects. All.

Storage usage has though, not sky rocketed but got higher since moving to RAW, but hey. Disc quota usage is nothing to the fact that you can get more out of the RAW images.