Since digital photography allows to see the result immediately on the back screen of the camera, a lot of people think that a photograph is a JPEG file created by the camera’s processor.
That is not totally right.
It is often said that the quality of a photograph depends on the price of the camera !… It is an illusion.
First of all, a good photograph requires some good light.
A good photographer will decide to choose from many parameters like speed, aperture, metering exposure, angle of view, distance from the subject etc…
A trained eye will see not only the subject but also what’s in the background.
But when the photos are taken, most of the photographers will only correct the photos on a general basis : exposure ( lighten or darken ) and color ( warm , cold , RVB, CMY).
Since 2007, we decided to process our images differently.
We shoot our photos in RAW file format instead of JPEG. It gives us a bigger depth of contrast. It gives more details in lowlights and highlights. It gives less noise when enlighting dark areas. It allows us to change completely the colors when the camera has not seen the right colors ( and yes , it happens all the time). RAW files have no compressed informations like JPEG, we can save wonderful images that would go immediately to the bin in JPEG.