Group items tagged

It seems like everybody has an opinion when it comes to RAW vs JPEG photo formats - myself included. In preparation for the next article in the "Adobe Bridge" series, I'd like to get this out of the way so we can just refer back to it. I won't try pushing one format over the other due to my personal preference, I'm just going to present you with a few images. It's up to you to decide what looks best and if that format fits into your own workflow.

A raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be used with a bitmap graphics editor or printed. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal colorspace where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a "positive" file format such as TIFF or JPEG for storage, printing, or further manipulation, which often encodes the image in a device-dependent colorspace. These images are often described as "RAW image files" based on the erroneous belief that they represent a single file format. In fact there are dozens if not hundreds of raw image formats in use by different models of digital equipment (like cameras or film scanners).[1]

So, you've forked over at least $600 (but probably $1000) for your first DSLR camera. You have more buttons, dials, and menus than you know what to do with, even after reading through the fat booklet that came with your camera and explains its usage in ten differnent languages.

It's all you can do to understand ISO, shutter speed, and how less is more when it comes to aperture. This beast of a camera can produce files in a Raw format, whatever that means, but it also has the nice comfortable JPEG format that we all know and love.

Like me you probably happily shoot in JPEG for quite awhile - getting used to the myriad of options available to you. One day you look at that Raw setting and ask, "should I be using Raw for the best quality? What is Raw, exactly?"

Cameras all start with raw data and convert this data to JPG images with hardware in the camera. They then throw away the raw data since it's no longer needed.

Saving this raw data is exactly like people who save twenty years of newspapers in piles around their house. They know they might need the information sometime, but it sure gets in the way! Other people think they are crazy.