Canon uses the term CR2 for its’ RAW files, Sony uses ARW and Nikon uses NEF…all pretty much the same thing. This is the most robust, data rich file format for a captured image. It is essential to take your photos in the RAW format, to safely save your best RAW images and back them up in several places. As long as you have the RAW image, you can always start over and process the image to it’s full potential. Save the RAW files…keep them well organized, backed up and safe.
When we are done with editing a photo we plan to use in the gallery, we Export it from Lightroom as a TIF file so we can go back and edit it further without having to start over, a jpeg as we use that full jpeg to send to the processing lab to print the print and as a downsized quite small image for Instagram and emailing and the like. That downsized one has our signature or watermark on it and is small enough that it will not print great if someone decides to steal the image from us…which happens often. I will tell you how to get your own signature/custom made watermark onto your downsized photos in a future article.
By the way, once I have a finalized image that I love, I go back into Photo on my Mac and create an album for it in the My Albums area of Photo…and drag that downsized photo into that album. The albums I have might say…turtles, whales, sharks, crocs, Africa, people, landscape, lava cliff, lava field and on and on…I have about 30 of them. Every now and again I synch my phone and iPad through iTunes on my Mac and that is how I keep my good shots well organized and able to show quickly to a potential customer in the gallery. There are a dozen other ways to do that…that just happens to be the way I like to do it.
RAW files…got to have them…got to love them…got to keep them safe. They are your treasure if you are to become an expert photographer. Without them, we can’t help you very much…you are limited by the jpegs or other lesser files that have already thrown away a bunch of data you will wish you had at some point down the road. Aloha.