We often talk about ‘headroom’ when discussing the benefits of raw, but what does
this mean in practice? Because raws hold more color information than JPEGs, they can
withstand heavier editing – whether that be a strong contrast boost, a dramatic color shift
or an intense tonal shift. JPEGs tend to deteriorate and display banding or artifacts when
subjected to repeated tonal changes, while raws hold up to this. As such, it’s best to do as
much of your editing as possible on the raw file: if you need to make a JPEG, do so at the end
of your workflow.34 RAWS WITHSTAND
HEAVIER EDITING
35 USE AUTO WHITE BALANCE
36 USE DXO’S PRIME NOISE
Shoot raw and you don’t need to
get hung up on your camera’s white
balance settings, which might save you
time while shooting, or give you a safety
net in tricky conditions where the white
balance could be difficult to pin down. Many
photographers like to use Auto white balance
in combination with raw. This way, we let the
camera set a white balance, but we have the
option to change it later on.Certain excellent editing tools will only
work on raw files. For example, the raw
editor DxO PhotoLab features the brilliant
Prime noise-reducing command, which applies
advanced algorithms to reduce noise in high-
ISO images – but it can only be used on raws.