Shooting in Raw

Should you shoot in Raw, your pc instead of the digital camera will process the information and generate an image file form it. Guess which has more processing energy: your digital digital camera or your computer? Shooting in Raw will provide you with much more manage over how your image looks and even be capable to correct several sins you might have committed when you took the photograph, this kind of as the exposure.

To take benefit of this you will definitely need to use some software package on your computer to procedure the files and create JPEGs (or TIFFs). I've discovered the Camera Raw that comes with Adobe Photoshop CS2 to become really great at processing Raw files (even batch processing them), though everybody has their favorite (RawShooter has a great deal of fans). When you load a Raw file utilizing Adobe Photoshop CS2 the Camera Raw dialog will instantly pop up. Most of the time the automatic configurations are fairly decent, but you've the opportunity to change the white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, and even calibration of the red, green, and blue guns or correct for lens abberation – all lossless.

Part from the conversion to JPEG are sharpening algorithms and as a outcome, the unprocessed Raw file is much less sharp. Two points can have an effect on this, one may be the brand of camera (Nikon cameras are generally considered sharper, but this isn't true across all models) and also the other element may be the user configurations for sharpening in the camera.

Loading a Raw file inside a program this kind of as Adobe Photoshop CS2 will automatically apply white sense of balance, sharpening, constrast, brightness, etc… and can even batch process Raw files. I frequently use this function as a first pass after which go back and adjust the configurations if needed. This is espeacially helpful because even if I did every thing correct in digital camera when I took the photo and my conversion software package was able to use the complete processing energy of my desktop pc, the conversion to JPEG could nevertheless trick the camera or my computer and only my eye can create the correct while balance, constast, brightness, etc…

Here's a photo that I was able to recuperate because it was shot in raw format. It was at the end of the day very low light, and I didn't have a tripod. The photo was extremely underexposed and I was able to recover it 100%.

At the time I was shooting in both raw and JPEG and look at the difference in the recovery between JPEG and raw. Take a look...