RAW files
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The wife really came through this Christmas and bought me a Nikon D80. Although I’m very efficent in film cameras in formats from 35mm to 4″ x 5″, I must admit this digital world in which I’m now dealing with has me somewhat perplexed. But I’m learning.
Right now I’m shooting in full-resolution jpeg. I haven’t tried the RAW file thing as of yet. Any help would be appreciated…what are the advantages?I shoot RAW almost exclusively. While there is a little more work involved, it allows you to more easily change white balance, exposure, saturation, etc. without degrading the rest of the picture. I suppose if you always get the setting correct in-camera, jpg or tif are fine. If you are like me and sometimes miss those settings, it is nice to be able to quickly and easily correct them when processing your RAW file.
There are other advantages, but these are what I consider to be the biggest advantages.
If you have Photoshop or any similar software that lets you process RAW, shoot a couple of pictures in RAW and play around with them,
A few more things to ponder.
Some pros will advise you to archive everything regardless of how it was shot as TIF since it’s “lossless” or uncompressed data and not a proprietary format. Outdoor photographer George Lepp is a big advocate of this. Remember, like Zach says every time you save a jpeg over itself, you are compressing the file and loosing data. That’s not true of TIF or RAW, although you will lose data through edits in TIF. One sports photographer I know says he only shoots JPG.
One plus to the Canon 30D I use is I can shoot both RAW and JPG at the same time. I leave it on that setting. But when I upload files to the laptop, I delete the raw images except for the really important ones. A few times I have been able to salvage an image I had to shoot on the fly, and it turned out over or under exposed. I then later save those RAW files and unedited JPG’s I keep on CD when I have enough to fill it.
Archiving in TIF is not as critical as it once was, since there are a lot of programs (such as ACDSee Pro) out there now that can read every proprietary RAW format–a nice plus if you use more than one model of camera.
Great information! Thanks Zach .. I have been wondering about magazines accepting .jpg images, or if they indeed NEED RAW files.
You guys have been more than kind. Zack, you’re the first to explain RAW in a way that I can understand it. Thanks!
Things surely have moved along since I shot with my Nikon film cameras.
Personally, I always shoot in JPEG FINE, Large unless I am looking at a potential cover shot, when I will switch to RAW.Zach
I used to do that to, but after too many times of wishing that I had shot something in RAW rather than JPG, I switched to RAW full time. If you don’t need the RAW file you can convert it to JPG or TIF before you archive and discard the RAW file, but you can’t create a RAW from either of the other formats.
I used to do that to, but after too many times of wishing that I had shot something in RAW rather than JPG, I switched to RAW full time. If you don’t need the RAW file you can convert it to JPG or TIF before you archive and discard the RAW file, but you can’t create a RAW from either of the other formats.
Wes –
The only difference would be in the actual compression algorithm the image undergoes when you view it as a jpeg versus as a RAW image, but here’s the thing: RAW images themselves aren’t *viewable.*
The RAW vs JPEG issue comes up quite a bit in Outdoor Photographer Magazine–a publication I’ve found very useful.
An interesting article was in the July 2006 issue of Outdoor Photographer on “double processing” Raw files to keep max detail in the shadows and highlights.
Zach,
One point about JPEG that you missed and is important, more so than the compression issue.
When a JPEG image is created the processor will look for similar pixels that boarder each other, then, only save one of the pixels in that given area. A good example is if you are photographing a black dog on white snow. The processor will save one pixel that represents all the snow in the same level and one pixel for all the black in the dog in the same level.Just an experiment. Here is one shot on the 30D, saved as RAW and JPG FINE. Shot saturated (+2).
Beta.jpg is the original jpg file only resized in ACDSee Pro.
Beta2.jpg is the raw image saved as a jpg and then resized in ACDSee Pro.What am I seeing in the color difference between the two shots?
Sorry for the thinking out loud and bandwidth but I may have answered my own question. I just redid the experiment using Canon zoom browser to view the raw and jpg file and then importing them into Adobe Photoshop Elements for resizing and saving. The color on the shots that came out is exactly the same–not like when I used ACDSee Pro. That tells perhaps me something is off in ACDSee’s raw converter. Hmmmmm. Anybody have any similar experience or thoughts?
Is it best to use the camera manufacturer’s software to view the raw files?
Scott
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