Goodbye RAW, hello JPEG?

I treated myself to a new camera, a Fujifilm X100T, before we set off on holiday.

I’ve always shot in RAW format, allowing myself the most flexibility in post-processing. I’m modestly adept in Adobe Lightroom. But I kept reading how good the JPEGs are from the X100T. So, for our trip, I invested in a very large, 128 GB, SD card and shot RAW+JPEG Fine – belt and braces. In a few extreme very low light cases I shot JPEG only and boosted the ISO. The expected result was that my post-processing RAW should be better than the SOOC JPEG.

I returned home with about 1700 images, using about half my card and started the process of weeding out, post-processing and publishing. It took a few days.

Surprise. I have more keepers from the JPEGs than the RAWs. And many are my favourites. Ok, I do some post-processing – correcting horizons, cropping and lightening faces – but maybe a tenth of what I used to do.

The camera seems to do at least as good a job in camera as I do in post-processing. Less space is used on the SD cards and on disk. I do less work. And the camera supports the transfer of JPEGs, not RAW, to smartphones.

I think I’m sold. I think I’ll shoot JPEG by default.