Willi Kampmann
Sep 7, 2018 · 1 min read

Maybe older photographers remember badly compressed JPEGs from a decade ago; most contemporary discussions around JPEG focus on its low dynamic range (8bit vs 10bit or more), and occasionally on its inferior denoising and sharpening potentials. In every discussion I’ve seen, sooner or later the truism “RAW is to JPEG what film negative was to film positive” is mentioned. Overall, compression artefacts of older times are irrelevant in this context.

If you don’t significantly edit your photos, JPEGs are perfectly fine (from some manufacturers even more so than from others). On the other hand, if you shoot RAW, you need to edit your photos. If someone is surprised that an out-of-camera JPEG is sharpener than a RAW, it seems to me they haven’t really understood RAW. I’m sometimes having difficulty getting the colors (skin tones) in RAW as well as my camera does them in the JPEGs; but apart from that, with my editing style in DXO, RAW is vastly superior.