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Comment by ruairidhwm | Hacker News Reader

Most of this will be post-processed. You can get a decent camera + lens which helps, as well as a good eye for photography. The rest is shooting in RAW and knowing how to use Lightroom to get the most out of your photo.

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Is shooting in RAW important? Are we just talking about PNG/JPG artefacts and general lossiness of lossy compression?

Yeah a RAW image is like a 'digital negative' so it preserves all the data that the sensor in the camera captures. A JPEG or similar is processed and compressed so the camera makes some decisions and 'bakes in' stylistic choices which are much harder to fix in post.

You can read a bit more about it here: https://photographylife.com/raw-vs-jpeg

Shooting RAW gives you much more freedom to choose how a photo will be processed than letting the camera make some set of default choices about color rendering so it can spit out a JPG.

Yup - you can even use RAW processing from other sources and not just the camera manufacturer. If you only ever save JPEGs on camera then you are completely at the mercy of the camera manufacturer with no way to every change it if you don't care for the way it processed the raw image into the JPEG.

You lose more than quality when not shooting RAW. You are going to want all the data captured by the image sensor of your camera if you are going to edit your photographs later on, it gives you more to work with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format#Benefits.

I saw this article pop up the other day which goes fairly deep on the importance of RAW: https://lux.camera/understanding-proraw/. This is focused on iPhone photography, but there's plenty of other detail in there, especially the first half or so.

Another reason to shoot RAW - you can always reprocess the image later without loss. Newer algorithms pop up all the time and with RAW you can always start over from scratch. With storage being so cheap and computers as powerful as they are, theres little reason to not at least shoot RAW+JPEG. Having the option of the RAW file available for that magic shot is powerful. Even in the article the photographer mentions he didn't realize he captured one of his favorite photos when it happened - he only discovered it later.

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