Shooting
RAW
Paul Galatis, September 2025
The question I'm asked most often by new people I share photos with is, “Wow, did you take that photo on your iPhone?” What my ego hears is, “Wow, how did you take such a great photo?”
What these folks are often noticing, even if they can’t quite explain it, is the depth of field, the framing, the colour grading, the clarity, and the fine detail that’s hard to get from a phone snap or even from a DSLR shooting in JPEG file format. Move the sliders on these images to see the difference.
And while iPhones take incredible photos these days, it's hard to achieve amazing results unless you're shooting in RAW and using great lenses. Lenses make an enormous difference. But RAW is where a lot of the magic happens.
RAW files are large because they preserve the full range of colour and brightness captured by the camera's sensor. All of that information is stored for you to access and work with later. The trick and the challenge, though, is that you have to take your photos through a post-production process later. If you don't, you're wasting your time and will simply end up with a bunch of very large, very dull photos.
JPEGs, by contrast, use a pre-programmed algorithm to interpret the data your camera captures. This algorithm is a post-production setting decided upon by an engineer sitting in California or China. This engineer makes the decision about how your photos should be treated, compresses them and creates a smaller file by discarding the detail that is no longer needed, resulting in a small file that's easy to share, but difficult to edit to any notable degree. It also results in your photos looking like everyone else's.
The extra data that RAW captures gives me much more flexibility when editing. Most noticeably, I can recover detail in both the highlights and the shadows — the very parts that would be lost in a JPEG. It also lets me make my photos look like mine.
The image on the right is the untouched RAW file, displayed exactly as it comes out my camera. I usually underexpose my images to ensure I don't lose any details in the highlights which explains why they all look quite dark. The image on the left then reveals how much detail I'm able to bring to life with a light edit.
Once Ive framed The camera's job is to collect all the available light from a scene. I think of my job as choosing which process and to create a photorgaph that best matches what I remember seeing and feeling in the moment.