RAW vs. Jpeg (and baking cookies)
Since photographers started using digital cameras the question has been around, RAW or JPEG? Now, I am a person who feels that people sometimes overthink when it comes to photography and make things more complicated when they could be much simpler if we just stopped overthinking. And that applies to RAW vs JPEG. We could dive into the fine details of each file type but we really don't need to do that.
Peeling away all the layers of overthinking leaves us with the fact that RAW gives the photographer more control - and thats good, we want control. When you shoot in RAW the image that you will see upon importing to Lightroom will probably look a little dull and flat and that's because it has NOT been processed - that's up to you to do when shooting RAW. If you shoot in JPEG the image will have more contrast and more "pop" and may look better initially because it IS being processed - by the camera, not you. But because the camera is processing the image for you it is also taking away your control. You can think of it like baking cookies. RAW gives you all the ingredients to make a fantastic cookie and you can decide if you want to make them chocolate chip or add M&Ms and Reeses Pieces and Hershey Kisses and Andes Candies or whatever you want! JPEG makes Chocolate Chip - that's it, hope you like it. If you shoot JPEG you take away control to bring back shadow and highlight detail and as you can see below you take away control to adjust color balance.
This is the DNG RAW file. When you navigate the Color Balance submenu you can see the variety of options for adjusting the color balance.
This is a JPEG file. You can see in the Color Balance submenu to the right that the multitude of options has decreased to just 3 options.
So is there a downside to RAW? Sure there is. RAW files are generally bigger and take up more space. They take longer to import and take more processing power to adjust. If you shoot mobile some devices don't support shooting RAW. It takes special software (uh hmm..Lightroom) to process RAW images. But all these problems are being solved and soon most mobile devices will be able to shoot RAW - the Lightroom Mobile APP allows you to shoot in DNG - and storage is becoming cheaper by the second. So to me shooting RAW is a no brainer but for you JPEG may work better but I highly suggest, if possible, shoot in RAW - you can make better cookies!