By Diane Tessa Griffiths

To me, the question of whether you should shoot RAW or JPEG depends entirely on what you want from or to do with the photos.

JPEG = Shoot & Share
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a type of digital compression. The photos are processed automatically within the camera. This means that they fall out of the camera ready to share on Facebook (for example) or to print, nothing else needs to be done to them.
Pros

• Automatically prepped in-camera for use.
• Can view on most technological devices.
• The automatic processing is designed to look good on portable devices.
• Smaller file size.
• Faster transfer time to computer because of the smaller file size.

Cons

• Not as flexible as RAW if you want to tweak them with post-processing software such as Photoshop.
• JPEG is a 'lossy' format, which means that every time you save over the file you lose data within the photo. So the quality of the photo drops on every save (only a little). To overcome this you can save as a different version (i.e. photo_v2.jpeg).

RAW = All data
RAW (raw) is essentially a digital negative, it holds all the photo data and no processing is carried out within the camera. You have to use a post-processing software program to get it into a share or print format, however you have a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to tweaking the photo (e.g. increasing the colour, strengthening the contrast or delete an unwanted object, to name just a couple of possible tweaks)
Pros

• VERY flexible, it contains a lot of data you can you manipulate/retouch the photo quite a lot without losing detail. For me that's a massive 'Pro'.

Cons

• Large file size, so you need to ensure you have the memory card and hard drive space to capture and store your photos.
• You have to process the file in order to share or print it.
• The photos often look washed out because of the way the raw data is captured, although this doesn't really matter because of the power you have at your fingertips in post-production.

Still not sure?
That's okay; most cameras offer an option to shoot both at the same time and decide later, just beware that it's capturing two files; one is quite big so you need the memory card space.
Conclusion
If you're interested in capturing memories and sharing them, go for JPEG, it's quick, versatile and doesn't suck up your hard drive space. However, if you're like me and into getting the very best out of a photo, then it has to be RAW.