I use a DSLR camera, which I love for many reasons. I love how much I can customize the settings, compared to a point and shoot. I love throwing backgrounds into a pretty blur when I’m shooting portraits. Recently, I have delved into the world of shooting in RAW (instead of JPG) and I am really excited about what it has done for my photography.
A RAW image is just what it sounds like: a raw photo. It has not been processed and compressed by the camera, as are JPG files. When you use a point and shoot digital camera, or you set your DSLR to save your images in JPG format, the camera applies certain characteristics to the photo before compressing and saving the file to your memory card. Some of these settings you specify yourself, such as “vivid” or “monochrome.” Other settings, such as sharpening or contrast, may be done for you without you ever realizing it. Have you ever noticed how different brands of cameras can produce different pictures of the same thing? One might have deeper color or more contrast than the other, even at their default settings. Camera manufacturers program their cameras to apply certain filters and settings to their images by default. When you shoot in RAW, however, your camera is simply saving the “light data” in a large file format without doing anything to the data first. What you see is exactly what the camera saw.
To some people, RAW probably sounds like a nightmare, and if you are taking pictures for the sole purpose of throwing them up on Facebook, than RAW is totally impractical. You must edit each individual file and apply your own filters and settings in a program like Photoshop that can handle the RAW format. Needless to say, I only shoot in RAW when the outcome of the photos is really important. Most of the time, I leave my camera in Vivid mode with JPG output. The pictures come out great most of the time, unless I completely botched up the exposure.
The benefit of RAW is that it acts like a time machine when the photos must be good. It allows you to “go back” and edit the original file without affecting the image quality. You can do virtually anything but recompose the shot. I have completely blown out images (where I had the exposure set much too high), and I was able to fix them in the RAW editor by bringing the exposure back down with a simple slider. You could never tell it was overexposed to begin with. When I have tried to do this to a JPG image, I was unsuccessful. It’s no wonder, since the original camera data was lost when the camera compressed the file to JPG. With RAW, all the data is there for you to manipulate.
If you want to shoot in the RAW (sounds exotic, doesn’t it?), you need a large memory card (to hold all the large files) and a program that is specifically designed to view and edit the RAW format. Photoshop and Lightroom are probably the most common programs for RAW editing, but there are others as well. If you want to try RAW, but you are sitting on the fence, set your camera to shoot in RAW+JPG. Your camera will save each image in both formats. It takes up more memory, but it will allow you to use some of the JPG files as is without having to edit them in a RAW editor.