I read something yesterday that bothered me. A really talented photographer, who has a blog that I like to read sometimes, posted an article stating that the number one thing you can do to improve your landscape photography is to shoot RAW. His argument was, essentially, that post-processing is a necessary aspect of photography, so you might as well fully embrace it and start with a RAW file. I get that if you plan to significantly manipulate your photographs you should probably use RAW because a JPEG is limited in how far you can take it before it begins to degrade. I disagree that post-processing is always or even usually needed, and I don’t think anyone should feel like they must fully embrace it. Edit if you want, or save yourself a bunch of time and strive to get the look that you are after using the options found in your camera. Most of the time it’s possible to get the look that you want straight out of camera, no editing necessary.
I’m going to make a bold statement. I think your missive is as one-sided as that other photographer. I think you’re both wrong.
When I am out in shooting I do not have the luxury of time to endlessly fiddle with the camera settings to get a JPEG. And that JPEG is the one the camera algorithm produced as opposed to the one I could produce in Adobe Lightroom. If you are happy with your JPEGs. Great.
Most of the time, nothing I see in the camera is what I want the final result to be. The camera NEVER sees what I see. It’s just a starting point.
I shoot in RAW+FINE. I keep the RAW file as my negative. I toss the JPEG file into social media. Then I download the RAW image — my digital negative — into Lightroom and manipulate it to create what I want to create.
I don’t toss my film negatives into a fire and only keep the print interpretation of that negative that CVS/Walmart provide me.
