Hacker News Reader

If you underexpose too severely, the JPEG compression will eat up all the detail in the shadows.

Pretty much any serious camera, and I think even serious camera-phones these days, will optionally record the image as RAW data rather than encoding as jpeg.

That you want to shoot RAW is pretty much covered in day 1 of intro to digital photography. The only exception to the rule is when you need super-fast frame capture rate, and the bandwidth to storage of much larger RAW files interferes. This is typical of folks shooting sports.

Even then the entry level full-frame cameras will shoot something like 10 photos per second in RAW which is usually sufficient for sports or motorsports photography. There is a compressed raw mode that's required to enable the fastest capture mode but when you get into more expensive cameras like the Sony A1, it can shoot full resolution (50 megapixel) raw with auto focus at 30 frames per second which is mind blowing. It costs $6,500 vs $2,000 for the A7Iv though so you're definitely paying for it.

You can push shadows in Lightroom before exporting jpg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com