Many of us have felt disappointment when we photograph a beautiful sunset only to find it looking entirely unlike what our eyes see. With RAW, you can change the image afterward to make it resemble what you actually saw. A JPEG capture essentially commits to the white balance the camera estimates was accurate when the photo was taken.

In essence, the stock camera app decides how to process RAW files for you, making choices like ‘What is the most natural white balance?’. Sometimes it’s wrong; sometimes you want to go in a different creative direction. Processing photos is just as much art as science.

So, should you always shoot RAW?

No. RAW isn’t always the best choice. Because RAW files can’t use lossy compression, they’re about 10 megabytes, while the humble JPEG is under three megabytes. If you’re taking a photo of where you parked, RAW is probably overkill.

But there’s a more serious issue: a lot of people turn on RAW, and they’re confused at photos looking kind of… bad. What’s going on?

RAW Caveat 1: Always Check for RAW Support

We’re not just talking about the app you use to take the photo: only load RAW files in apps you know support RAW files. This is very confusing because RAW files look like regular image files to most apps.

Remember how we said RAW files are really slow to load? It would be annoying to flip through a folder, trying to find a particular photo, and have to wait a few seconds for every file to load.

That’s why RAW files also contain a very low resolution preview image. It isn’t designed for editing, just finding your photo. This preview is only half a megapixel, while the real image inside is over twelve megapixels.

Now this is where most people get confused: apps that don’t support RAW will still load the image. However, they just load the low resolution preview instead of the full-resolution image. And they won’t warn you. Believe it or not, the built in iOS Photos app doesn’t support RAW, and that’s why you see this: