3. SET YOUR RAW/JPEG IMAGE QUALITY If you are upgrading from a digital point-and-shoot camera to the 60D, then you are probably already familiar with the JPEG file format. With DSLR cameras you also have the option of using the RAW format. In this section, I will discuss the basics of the two file types, and in Chapter 2 you’ll find much more detailed information on their differences, benefits, and disadvantages. Let’s start with the JPEG file format. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It was developed as a method of shrinking digital images in order to reduce large file sizes while retaining the original information. (Technically, JPEG is a mathematical equation for compressing a file format, but we’ll refer to it as a file format to keep things simple.) Your camera will embed all information into the photograph at the time of exposure. When you shoot in JPEG you have smaller file sizes, but that also means that each image has less information and lower quality, and making any extreme enhancements or edits to the image could degrade the image quality even more. However, using JPEG you can fit many more images on your memory card, and the images will write to the card faster, which can make this type of file format desirable to many wedding and sports photographers. RAW files, on the other hand, retain much more information than JPEG files, are not compressed, and offer a lot more “wiggle room” during your editing process (things like exposure and white balance can easily be adjusted without extreme loss of image quality). The downside to this format is that your file sizes will be much larger, and you won’t be able to fit as many images on your memory card as you could using JPEG. You’ll also need to have a good understanding of photo editing, along with the corresponding software, to edit and share your images. The 60D has several options for shooting modes. You have the choice to shoot in JPEG only, RAW only, or a combination of the two. If you are new to digital photography and don’t know much about shooting RAW and using sophisticated editing software, I recommend you stick with JPEG for now. However, I do encourage you to learn about the RAW format since it can be extremely useful to work with during the editing process. If you aren’t sure what you want to do, and you happen to have a lot of card space, then you can always shoot in both RAW and JPEG at the same time. But for now let’s focus on setting up your camera to shoot in JPEG. When shooting in JPEG format, you need to make some decisions that will determine the file size and quality of your images. There are three different sizes—Large, Medium, and Small—which indicate the actual physical size of your image in pixels. When picking the quality setting, you have two choices: Fine (high quality) and Normal (lower or normal quality). My recommendation, if you prefer to shoot in
CHAPTER 1: THE 60D TOP TEN LIST
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