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nless you’re a pro news or sports photographer who needs to send JPEG files to a picture desk in real time, there’s no reason for not capturing Raw files whatever you’re shooting. Due to their compressed file size, J PEGs are brilliant for sharing and storing, but if you want to take your photography to the next level, you’ll need to be able to exploit the full information contained in a Raw file.
Unlike JPEG, which actually stands for ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’, ‘Raw’ isn’t an acrony m; it literally means the raw data straight from the camera. This extra data does come at the cost of larger files and at up to four times the size, it’s true that Raw files will fill a memor y card or hard drive faster. But this is a price worth paying for the additional editing possibilities they allow.