Help me understand RAW
- This topic has 7 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated Nov 15, 2008 at 1:29 am by
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This past weeks trip I shot about 50/50 between jpeg and RAW.
Simple answer.
Yes RAW “look” dull and flat compared to jpegs.Short explanation.
Camera manufactorers assume most people who shoot jpeg don’t want to “Post” process. Hence, you can generally make easy presets for your jpgs. +1 contrast, +3 saturation, etc. Even so called “picture” styles are little more than preset adjustements.To whit.
RAW: its a digital negative, noting is done to them in camera
Jpegs: A fair amount of stuff, from contrast,saturation,sharpening is done in camera, even at the lowest presets.There are many folks on this forum more knowledgable than me, but a simple answer is that the JPEG image is porcessed by the camera, so you are seeing the end reslut the way the camera chose to process the image.
Another more slightly technical differentiation is that jpegs are lossy and raw is lossless. A processed jpeg throws away file information for that image. A raw image is as described a digital negative. Early in the digital revolution, storage was at such a premium that a lot of photographers shot jpegs due to storage space limitations. There was also another cadre that went from shooting chromes all day, day-in-day-out, that was so good at proper exposure (due to small latitude for chrome) they could shoot jpegs and didn’t really feel the need for raw’s latitude. The jury is pretty much in at this point, and RAW WINS in the pro realm because of its latitude, storage concerns are nil, and quality concerns (due to jpeg compression aka. loss) are out of the equation. And software has stepped in to make the workflow from raw to whatever you want a non-factor. The only problem I encounter with raw is that software such as Photoshop and Aperture are slow to update their raw translators for new cameras. That is extremely frustrating. shannon
More directly to the question – raw images “can be” flatter looking due to the fact they have a greater range. Jpegs throw away information that basically makes an image take on more contrast and have less range. If you want a [s:3vyo9ioq]more contrasty[/s:3vyo9ioq] less flat raw image, you can dig deep into the camera firmware and change your color settings. shannon
What may be throwing you a bit is despite shooting in raw the image on your LCD on the cam can’t display the RAW image ( you can read it though)
This is an important detail b/c I was confused as to why it gave such detail on the LCD. Thanks for the clarification.
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