Shooting RAW gives you the greatest flexibility for adjusting your images.
If you’re serious about your photography, you should shoot RAW. Period. The end.
But wait. Don’t they take up too much room on your hard drive and cause you to spend too much time in front of your computer?
No, and no. Hard drive space is cheap and as you get more comfortable making RAW conversions and establish an efficient workflow, your time at the computer is very well spent. To understand why, let’s explore how digital cameras work.
When you click the shutter, the camera records the amount of light that hits each of pixel on the digital sensor. The sensor itself does not discern color, but special red, green and blue filters that cover the sensor allow each pixel to record this brightness as a specific tonal value for each of those three colors, or channels. Cameras have 12-bit sensors, can discern and record any one of 4,096 different levels of brightness for each color, or channel. Since there are three channels, this represents 4,096 x 4,096 x 4,096, or 68.7 billion possible color combinations, which translates into an extremely wide and smooth range of color gradations.
Before it can be viewed as an image, though, this RAW data must be converted into another format, such as JPEG or a TIFF. This conversion is either done inside the camera, or else by using RAW conversion software on your computer.
RAW Mode:
When you shoot in RAW mode and save the file onto the memory card, the sensor data is written along with an accompanying header file that contains all of the camera settings, such as the white balance, sharpening level, contrast, saturation, and any other meta-data or user defined information about the image. These settings are only tagged onto the RAW image data and do not affect the original sensor data in any way.
When you open the RAW file in your imaging software, you can adjust the image, plus ANY of the settings that are written in that header file in a non-destructive way. You are not actually altering the RAW file itself, you’re only modifying the metadata information and any changes you make to the image are only written into the accompanying xmp sidecar file.
When you finally convert the RAW file, or save the image as a JPEG or TIFF, your edits are written permanently onto the saved image. Your RAW file is not altered though. In fact, RAW files are never written over, which means you can go back and change or adjust your original image in any way you want, any time you want. In that way, it’s like a digital negative.
Also, when you open your RAW file in your software, the color and brightness data is spread out into a 16-bit workspace, which gives you 65,536 levels of brightness to work with in each of the RGB channels. This translates into an enormous amount of latitude and headroom with which to fine tune your exposure and color corrections and bring out detail in all but the deepest shadows and the brightest highlights.
JPEG Mode:
When you take a picture in JPEG mode, the same thing happens up to a point. The light is captured and recorded by the sensor just as if you were shooting in RAW mode.
However, all of those camera settings, like white balance, sharpness, and saturation are merged with the sensor data and written permanently onto the image file. Then, the image is converted down from a 12-bit file into an 8-bit file, which means that those 4,096 levels of brightness that were recorded by the image sensor are reduced to only 256 brightness levels. Finally, the image is compressed with whatever compression setting you have set on the camera, usually, Low, Medium, and High, and saved as a JPEG.
Once the image is saved as a JPEG, NONE of the original camera settings can ever be changed or altered, and when you open the image in your imaging software, you have far less latitude with which to make level and tonal adjustments.
That’s not to say that you can’t achieve high quality imagery and very good results when shooting in JPEG mode, in fact, many digital cameras produce very high quality JPEGs. An 8-bit image still yields 16.7 million possible color combinations, which is the standard bit depth for professional color printing. The limitation is that once you’ve gone from 16-bit down to 8-bit, you can’t go back. The original color information is lost and you can no longer make fine color corrections or rescue any more detail from the shadows or blown out highlights.
Shooting in RAW will allow you to extract the maximum quality from your digital photographs and really make them pop. Most images benefit from some adjustments and you’ll get better results by doing them yourself them on a computer, instead of letting the camera make those decisions for you.
If it’s convenience you’re after, then shooting in JPEG mode is fine. However, if you’re shooting for quality and want the best best possible results from your digital photography, no matter your subject, then you should be shooting in RAW. Period. The end.
Shooting in RAW allowed me to make maximum exposure adjustments, regain lost highlights, and get the best possible results from my digital image.
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Dan Bailey is a professional adventure, outdoor and travel photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. You can follow his own blog at danbaileyphoto.com/blog and see his daily Facebook updates at facebook.com/danbaileyphoto
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