You've probably been told you should shoot RAW. And I'm sure you've also thought - WHY? I'm just delivering a JPEG file anyway. What's inside a RAW file that makes it worth the storage space?

This episode gets into the numbers, and once you see them, the case for RAW becomes impossible to argue with. Yes, I knew it was your understanding that there would be no math, but, unfortunately, there's actually a lot of math behind what you see in digital photos.

Bit depth is exponential, not additive. A standard JPEG is 8-bit, giving you 256 brightness levels per colour channel and roughly 16.7 million possible colours total. A 14-bit RAW file gives you 16,384 levels per channel — over 4 trillion possible colours. That gap is invisible straight out of camera. It becomes very visible the moment you start editing.

We cover the staircase effect — what happens to smooth gradients in low bit-depth files when you push exposure or shadows in post. Those gaps between brightness levels stretch apart and become visible as banding: ugly, digital-looking stripes in what should be a smooth sky or a softly lit wall. In a 14-bit file, the steps are fine enough that normal editing simply can't pull them apart.

We also break down the difference between lossless and lossy RAW compression. Lossless compression reduces file size without discarding any data — think of it like a ZIP file for your image. Lossy compression makes a permanent, one-time decision to discard some sensor data at capture. For many shots you'll never notice. For scenes with subtle gradients or heavy shadow recovery, you might.

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About The Podcast

The Nerdy Photographer Podcast is written and produced by Casey Fatchett. Casey is a professional photographer in the New York City / Northern New Jersey with more than 20 years of experience. He just wants to help people and make them laugh. You can view Casey's wedding work at https://fatchett.com or his non-wedding work at https://caseyfatchettphotography.com

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