Can you shoot exclusively in JPEG as a professional photographer? Check out our interview with award winning wedding and portrait photographer Scott Robert Lim, as he explains why he's been shooting only in JPEG for over 23 years.
I recently had the opportunity to interview award-winning master photographer and Sony Artisan of Imagery Scott Robert Lim. Scott has over 70 international awards to his name and is regarded as one of the world's finest wedding and portrait photographers.
A few years ago, I attended one of Scott's presentations and was blown away when he mentioned that he shoots exclusively in JPEG as a professional. Like many others, I've always associated being a pro with shooting in raw, so when Scott mentioned that he's a pro JPEG shooter, I had to learn more.
Take a look at the interview below to learn more about Scott, better understand his approach, and some of the reasons behind why he's chosen to shoot in JPEG as a professional photographer for over two decades.
The Interview
Q: Tell us a bit about your background, your style of work, and how long you’ve been shooting in JPEG versus raw.
A: I've been a professional photographer for 23 years and have been shooting in JPEG for my entire career. I started as a wedding photographer and have shot hundreds of weddings around the world. I've transitioned into teaching, mentoring, and coaching photographers of all levels. I'm usually teaching or hosting workshops every other week somewhere around the country or internationally. I photograph at 30 events a year, give or take. I love shooting on-location portraits and also love the challenge of shooting everything from sports, to street, and landscape.
Q: What made you decide to switch your workflow from raw to JPEG?
A: When you shoot in JPEG, it makes everything faster. Back in 2001 when I was shooting four-megapixel files, shooting raw meant having a buffer of maybe three images, and then you had to wait for it to copy to your card. On the other hand, if I shot JPEG, I could easily double that speed, and usually never had to wait for my camera to buffer. I just couldn't afford to wait for my camera to write to my card, which made shooting in JPEG ideal.
In addition to the buffering advantage, during the beginning of my career, I would incur many more image errors when shooting raw. I consulted a famous wedding photographer who shot hundreds of weddings a year and told me not to shoot in raw. This was because his studio would incur many image errors due to shooting in raw. It was hard for older camera technology to write larger files on a memory card back then. If I bumped my camera when it was writing an image to a CF card, there was a higher chance of an image error.
Another reason I started shooting in JPEG is cost savings. My general rule for data backup is 3-2-1: three copies, two locations, and one online storage location. Shooting in JPEG with 24-megapixel to 60-megapixel files, I usually use 2 TB of storage per year. In order to be safe, I make three copies of my work, meaning for every year that I shoot, I have to have around 6 TB of storage. If I shoot in raw with files five times the size, I now have to store 30 TB of data per year, which is a lot to manage, and also costs much more! I recently transferred all of my digital files onto a single 14 TB drive, which I can easily clone onto another drive, and give to a friend or relative to store for me. In contrast, if I shot in raw for all of those images, I would have needed 50-60 TB to store everything on. Shooting in raw makes it much harder and more expensive to store and copy my images, since there are no low-cost 50 TB drives.
Q: What would you say the biggest benefit has been for you since switching to JPEG for editing?
A: Speed! It's so much faster to work with JPEG versus raw images on your computer. Basically, if you want to double the speed of your computer, just shoot in JPEG. Sometimes, I'm scrolling through thousands of images in Lightroom, and shaving seconds per image adds up to a lot of time saved. Shooting in JPEG also means that you don't have to use the latest and greatest computers to edit your images, saving you even more time and money. I know that raw has much more dynamic range and detail, but I've had my images published all around the world, and not once has anyone noticed that I shot them in JPEG. Post-processing can also make up for image shortcomings. I have people wonder how I get my images so sharp.
Q: What are some of the most important considerations that new photographers should keep in mind if they decide to shoot JPEG exclusively?
A: The better you are at lighting and getting a balanced exposure, the easier it is for you to shoot in JPEG. You don't want to over-expose large areas of your frame with no detail on a regular basis. If you are a photographer that loves to use off-camera lighting or is very good at using natural light, the transition to JPEG should be relatively easy. Shooting in JPEG, you get about two stops of compensation, whereas with raw files, you get about four (as I'm told, as I don't really know because I don't shoot raw). It's like shooting slide film from back in the day, where the exposure needed to be right on. With modern mirrorless cameras, it's now much easier to nail the right exposure, or be within a couple of stops, because if you weren't, you'd never take the picture! You would instantly see that it's a bad exposure and fix it before shooting!
Q: Are there any examples of situations when you were shooting in JPEG, and you wished you would have chosen to shoot in raw?
A: Shooting in raw would be nice in situations where I need to pull back the highlights in a bright sky, especially when my subject is backlit by the sun, and I'm unable to light my subject with an off-camera light to balance the exposure. Lightroom and Photoshop make it easy to deal with this challenge now, so I can still change the exposure of my background, or swap out a sky with literally one click. I don't find that I would ever shoot raw for what I do, given that I can overcome these challenges through post-processing.
Q: Are there any non-negotiable situations where raw is absolutely necessary?
A: Yes, if my client demands the files in raw. I usually explain to my client that I've shot in JPEG for my entire career, and 99% won't care how I shoot, as long as I get the results that they're looking for. However, if they insist that I shoot in raw, then I do.
Q: Any general advice for creators who want to consider optimizing their workflow for JPEG?
A: If you're unsure about switching to JPEG, keep in mind that most cameras have two card slots. Start shooting in both JPEG and raw, so you can practice using the JPEG files to edit and still have the raw files in case you need them. Once you start gaining confidence in shooting JPEG, you can stop saving the raw files. After doing this for 6–12 shoots, you'll learn if shooting in JPEG works for you. Every photographer should have a decent backup workflow with their files. Remember the simple data redundancy formula of 3-2-1: three copies, two locations, and one online storage location.
Will You Switch to Shooting JPEG?
What are your takeaways from Scott's advice and experience? Shooting in JPEG seems to offer many advantages: speeding up your workflow, reducing the load on your computer, and cost savings from having less data to store. All of these things seem like compelling reasons to shoot JPEG as a professional, so it may be worth considering.
Share your thoughts in the comments below, and let us know why you would or wouldn't switch to an all-JPEG workflow!
Images used with permission of Scott Robert Lim.
No matter what anyone says here, just shoot in whatever format you choose for whatever reason you choose. Ain't that deep. A photographer who shoots exclusively Jpeg isn't any less or more professional than one who shoots exclusively Raw. Do what works for you. The end :)
I agree with that, it's just that the interview is so 2002 for 2023!
It's more of necessity than desire. Professionals just don't have the time to worry about RAW processing. RAW processing is for rookies and pros with a lot of extra time. RAW stands for Rookies At Work. There was a time I was needing to process literally thousands of photos per week. Those days are behind me now and I'm so happy to call myself a rookie. And I happily process my RAW images. Actually more now than in years past. So again it goes back to necessity. What's yours.
So yeah I insulted a bunch of people by calling them rookies. That's not fair...I get it. But that was to draw attention to the point of it all. People that shoot in jpeg do it for a reason and raw for other reasons.
If I can just get myself to pick and stop shooting in both, more power to me....I just complicate my own workflow.
I do think the camera matters. I tent to "need" to shoot RAW with my Nikon D810 and happily in jpeg with my Olympus. The Olympus just nails the jpegs and RAW only marginally improves things. But if I'm short on time and shooting Nikon, those jpegs suddenly look amazing!!!
Some Raw humor here.
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You can't really make a blanket statement like that without being wrong. Some professionals shoot fine art imagery that depends very heavily on editing. To say that successful pros like Michael Shainblum and Brooke Shaden and Peter Lik don't have time to worry about post processing would be ludicrous. There are a lot of genres of professional photography besides wedding photography, commercial photography, portrait photography, and sports photography.
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I'm an event professional who processes hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. I shoot all in RAW and rely on DxO PhotoLab to make my ISO 25,600 images look great. There's no way on God's green earth that I could get similar image quality from OOC JPEGs. My rate is high enough to cover my postproduction time, and my results stand out from much of my competition.
Interesting article. It didn't sound like he'd reexamined raw with a modern camera. I remember the switch from film to digital. I remember my wife's 6.1MP APSC camera I got to shoot with on occasion. It was 2 years before Lightroom came out. I shot jpg. I was happy with my results. I later got a full frame camera and experimented with jpg, raw and Lightroom. I switched to raw. Figured if I was going to edit it anyway, I didn't need the camera's help. I didn't see it saving me any time then. I also didn't like the idea of editing a lossy format, regardless of the ability to see it.
I liked the reader comment about shooting 800 to 1500 sports images with fast turnaround. That's a good case for jpg. Better than this article for sure.
The storage argument didn't add up. 30TB a year is 31,457,280MB. He said he shoots 24 and 60MP. Let's take a raw file from a 47MP camera with 55MB raw file size. Divide and get 571,950 files. That's over half a million images a year! 19,000 images per event at 30 events per year. Just sorting that would be an undertaking. Even if that's correct, no way it's worth keeping it all.
As for PC speed, I've never had an issue. Then again, I don't shoot 19,000 images at a wedding or an airshow.
I don't care if people want to shoot jpg. My issue is that the arguments in the article were not compelling. I'd have been more impressed if he'd just said he shoots in jpg because he likes it, and so do his customers, and publications that use his images.
Since my Nikon D200 camera, I have always shot raw and jpg even when shooting sports. I use jpg for speed, I can review 45mp jpg images super fast in a browser or photo app in windows and edit them if I only need small adjustments. I have raw if I need it. I could use jpg most of the time. If I am doing something creative, I am glad I have raw. Multi TB spinning drives are so cheap There is no reason not to shoot both and even my longest sports shoots transfer to the computer quickly, I question more the need for more megapixels. I have seen 1080p on a projection tv, 4k on an even bigger screen which is an 8mp image. There is a point of diminishing returns on everything and I think we have reached resolution diminishing returns a long time ago.
Can't agree with the diminishing returns argument completely...
For almost all use cases, who needs more than 45mpix? For fine art and (sometimes) wildlife though, more is always better.
I appreciate that many would argue that the viewing distance on a print 1 meter across would allow 45mpix, but some viewers want to inspect the details and then 45 isn't enough without AI help. Of course, the image determines the detail requirements. If it's a cityscape you won't need the resolution as much as if it were a bird of prey.
Nt
I shoot RAW, but used to shoot JPEG. I have found, going through some of my old files, there are JPEG files that I want to use. And I discovered that when I open them in Photoshop, and use Camera Raw as the editing filter within PS, I can do a fairly good job of editing them.
One fun thing to do is to revisit older raw files. For old raw files that were previously processed with early raw process versions in ACR. Newer process versions can greatly expand on the the editing latitude of the raw files.
JPEG is a lossy format and every time you open and save it you lose some quality. This is why you have a raw file.
--- "every time you open and save it you lose some quality"
Not necessarily true. If you use a non-destructive editor (eg, Capture One, Lightroom, etc), you can edit and save a million times and the original jpg won't lose quality. Goes without saying as long as you don't write over the original jpg.
So open it, and then save the new edit as a different file. Don't write over the original.