The two hardest words for a RAW photographer: DECIDE and STOP

RAW files are great. They have an extended tonal range that lets you recover valuable highlight and shadow detail, they have extended color information that lets you choose the white balance later and override whatever was set on the camera, and they have an extended bit depth so they can withstand the heaviest editing processes without posterisation, histogram ‘combing’ or other horrible effects.

RAW files have so much going for them that you can understand why many photographers would not shoot anything else, and why in-camera JPEGs have such a poor reputation amongst serious photographers.

But while the technical advantages of RAW files are obvious, there are at least two downsides that are altogether less obvious. These downsides are more behavioural than technical, and altogether more insidious. They definitely affect me; they might be affecting you.

1. You can’t decide on a style

The beauty of RAW files is that they can be anything you want. They have limitless potential. You can apply any kind of processing style you like, any kind of ‘look’ you wish. You don’t have to decide when you take your pictures because you can choose later. What’s wrong with that?

Well, sooner or later, you have to decide what an image should look like. If you only shoot in-camera JPEGs, you probably have to make that decision right when you’re shooting. So shooting RAW is quite a luxury because now you get to choose later. You don’t have to choose a single look even then because in your cataloguing softwareyou can make as many virtual copies as you like in as many different styles as you like, from mono, to vintage, to high-key pastel and so on.

But that’s the danger. You no longer plan the finished photo in the same way when you’re shooting it. You think, “I’ve got the RAW file, I can do what I like later. And then, when it is later, you can’t decide which of the many alternative treatments you try is the best one. 

I say “you”, I mean “I” – but I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

It’s this whole idea of committing to how an image should look and sticking to it. If you shoot for a client it’s easy because you simply turn around a set of images in the style they want and move on to the next job. But for anyone accumulating a library of images, a personal body of work, it’s hard to commit and stay committed. There’s always one more effect to try, one more style you’ve discovered, and with every new virtual copy, every new variant, it gets harder to identify the photograph you intended to take.

We imagine that choice must always be good. But choice always brings decisions, and its hangers-on uncertainty, confusion and indecision.

2. You can’t stop editing and re-editing

Do you keep going back to your old images to try out a new preset or a new editing trick or a new denoising process? RAW processing is constantly improving, so the temptation to keep returning to your old files for another go is very hard to resist.

In fact, with RAW files it can be very hard to convince yourself that you’ve done everything right, tried every option, ticked every possible box. That’s the problem with the almost bottomless technical potential of RAW files – that’s it’s almost bottomless.

It can be very difficult to convince yourself that a RAW image is finally, definitively finished. This is expecially true with today’s excellent non-destructive cataloguing and editing tools like Lightroom, Capture One or DxO PhotoLab. But remember, you’re not looking at finished images, but a work in progress, an intermediate state where the image is still in the editing phase and does not really exist in that form outside of that application. That only happens when you export a processed image file, and for that you have to convince yourself to draw a line under your RAW edits and commit to creating a new file alongside the RAW. 

Why would you do that? Why create an additional image file you can no longer edit alongside a file you already have and can keep editing and re-editing as long as you like?

That’s the insidious effect of RAW files. It’s so much more tempting to stay at this intermediate editing phase rather than closing the circle, drawing a line and committing to a finished, processed image you can no longer change.

So what’s the answer?

Professional/commercial photographers don’t have this problem. They have a fixed timescale, a fixed brief and they have to deliver a set of images in the style the client asked for. Their photographic workflow has a start point and an end point. One job is finished, another starts.

It’s not so easy for the rest of us. They do say that you have to close a chapter before you can move on. It’s hardly that dramatic for photographers but it’s a similar issue – it’s hard to move forward as a photographer with all your old projects still ‘open’ and potentially unfinished.

There’s nothing wrong with RAW files, but they are not finished photographs. They are not the end point of your work. That only comes when you commit to a style, commit to your edits and export them as finished images. That’s how we can move on with new photography, and not be trapped amidst perpetually unfinished projects and un-made decisions.