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Yes you do. If you want to be able to post-process your photos in order to get great photos, you do need to shoot in RAW.

But what is RAW anyway?

A RAW file is all the data you digital camera collects from the sensor in one exposure stored into one file. Yes, it does take up a lot more space, than a jpeg, and that is because it contains a lot more information. A lot more information, than you would expect.

It is not more than a few months ago I started shooting in RAW for good. Earlier I shot some in RAW, but mostly I shot in jpeg. I didn’t do much post-processing of the photos and was quite happy with my jpegs. Now, as I start to post-process my photos I wished that I had shot more in RAW.

The RAW file is not fixed at a specific white balance setting, as a jpeg is. As a consequence of that, you can change the white balance in the post-processing. A huge advantage, because you can post-pone something from the field, to a later time when you have much better time to figure out, what the correct setting should be.

The RAW file contains much more information about colors. In particular in the dark areas of your photos the RAW file contains much more detail, which is important if you want to recorver information from the dark parts of the image.

Storing the RAW files at home

In the field you need more and/or larger memory cards in order to have room for many photos. The RAW files are enourmous in size, compared to the jpegs. It is a pain, but you get used to it. If possible you can also bring a laptop and an external harddrive to unload your camera onto at your hotel in the evening.

When you get home and you need to store you photos in your catalog, you can do so in the DNG format (Digital Negative lossless format by Adobe). It compresses the photos, and depending on your camera brand, model it compresses more or less. The RAW formats camera specific, not even manufactorer specific. A Nikon D800 RAW file is cut in half when converted to DNG, while a Canon 5D mark III file only gets 10-20% smaller.

So you need a digital workflow, that includes converting to DNG files, which is possible by using Adobe Light Room.