Camera RAW isn’t a single format but a family — Canon’s CR2/CR3, Nikon’s NEF, Sony’s ARW, Adobe’s universal DNG. What they share is that they record the sensor’s unprocessed data before any sharpening, noise reduction or colour decisions. RAW is a digital negative: you make those choices later, non-destructively, in Lightroom, Capture One or Darktable. The files are large and proprietary — always edit in RAW, then export.

01The formats that live on your hard drive

TIFF sits one step downstream: a lossless, full-quality master not tied to a specific RAW decoder, with 8- and 16-bit depth, multiple colour spaces, transparency and layers. Print shops and stock libraries accept it; your website does not — a single TIFF can run to hundreds of megabytes. HEIC is Apple’s default iPhone capture, using HEVC under the hood — roughly half a JPEG’s size at similar quality, with 10-bit colour. Its problem is reach outside the Apple ecosystem.

FormatWhat it isWhere it goes
RAWUnprocessed sensor data — the digital negativeEdit → export to JPEG/TIFF/AVIF
TIFFLossless full-quality masterArchive & print, never the web
HEICApple’s efficient capture containerConvert before sharing broadly

On the command line, ImageMagick or ffmpeg convert a batch cleanly — for example, HEIC to JPEG:

ffmpeg -i photo.heic -q:v 2 photo.jpg
20–50 MBtypical camera RAW file
256 MB+a large uncompressed TIFF
~½HEIC size vs equivalent JPEG