Dream In PicturesPhotography

The film negative of the digital world

This picture above is just a small taste of why I prefer to use RAW vs JPG when shooting and I’ll tell you a few technical reasons for that.

I personally want to make you look your best, and some other photographers might find that what comes straight out of their camera is a representation of how things are. What comes out of a camera lens although is not the way your eyes see the world around you. You’re eyes are able to capture an infinite number of colors and brightnesses and can do that in a speed that cannot be matched by any camera, no matter how expensive it is. I want people to understand that some images need help to stand out, and one simple way that will allow you to do just that is to start off recording the image in a format that allows for changes.

In this image example I was judging the scene with my tiny LCD screen and my in camera histogram of the captured image to judge how it would look when I pulled it up on the computer. I underestimated slightly how dark the image was and it came out with a less than preferred look. This is all ok though, as the RAW format has a lot of room to experiment and tweak.

Reasons RAW is better than JPG in this instance:

Color and Brightness levels

When you shoot an image with your normal everyday point and shoot camera, you are essentially saving your files as an 8 bit image with a 256 brightness level adjustment across three colors. This means that for each RBG value you have 256 levels between pure white and pure black. Now imagine what you get when you shoot in RAW. Since you as saving data to your memory card exactly as the sensor see’s each pixel it gives you what you can consider to be a film cameras version of a negative. You have the maximum image quality because the camera is not removing image data that you can not distinguish with your eyes on the screen. RAW is recorded from your camera in a 12,14, or 16 bit space and all of them regardless of which one comes from your camera is put on a 16 bit space inside your image editor of choice. This means that you have 65,536 levels to work with and that can mean the difference between saving an image that is too dark or too bright or not being able to use it at all if you shot the same shot in 8 bit JPG. I shot the image above at 100 ISO setting which meant there was very little noise even in the shadowy areas of the image which allows me to pull in the detail from those shadows. I would not have been able to easily do this with JPG.

White Balance

RAW does not set a white balance in your picture so you are free to change the image balance in any RAW editing program. I adjusted my white balance a few shades cooler in this image to make the sky seem a bit more blue. With JPG this would require destructive changes to the image that would be irreversible once the file was saved again leaving you with an unuseable image.

Conversion Processing

Most people don’t think about this, but when you let your camera do the conversions for you, you are giving your camera control over the way the colors look, the sharpness, and other factors. This may not be that big of an issue for you, but think of the processing power you computer has in comparison to the tiny processor in your camera. Your computer has the ability to run more mathematically challenging algorithms for sharpness and color correction than that of your camera, and you have the ability to tweak it at your pleasure with RAW.

Cons to RAW

RAW does not come without its downfalls although. If you are a sports shooter that needs to take 10’s and maybe 100’s of images in burst, then the file size, and slow write to your camera buffer will be a hindrance with RAW. Wedding photographers might stick to JPG if only for the size of the images and saving space on memory cards, but I think you would be hard pressed to find a wedding photographer who doesn’t realize the benefits of shooting in RAW.

Work Flow Process

The first image in this post is a view from Camera to Lightroom to Photoshop. My personal process flow is as follows:

Shoot in RAW

This is obvious. I make sure I shoot in RAW mode at all times unless I’m shooting a sport scene where I need maximum burst rate functionality. Some photographers even turn their JPG settings down to lower than maximum quality, but I don’t recommend this unless you don’t want the ability to crop down images later.

Edit RAW files

I use Adobe Lightroom for my RAW editing. Photoshop CS2 introduced the ability to edit RAW files as well with the Camera Raw plugin, but Lightroom does quick work with large pools of images that Photoshop is just not meant to do. If you are working with one single image from a session, you can probably get away with purely editing inside of Photoshop, but I tend to always make a pass through with Lightroom for my basic adjustments.

Edit 16bit files in Photoshop

From Lightroom I edit a copy of my image with my Lightroom adjustments inside of Photoshop as a 16 bit TIFF or PSD file that allows me to do layering and some limited 16bit functionality filters. This allows me the highest quality edits up until the point that I need a specific 8 bit filter option, at which point I down sample my 16 bit file to an 8 bit space and then save my TIFF or PSD.

Export out files

Back in Lightroom I make a comparison between the original image and the new image to make sure I like my changes, and I export out the image with Lightroom’s export feature. I am given a beautiful JPG at any size and quality that I specify, and the beauty of it is I can export out an entire gallery fairly easily.

The Final Image

As you can see the process in generating a really nice stunning image like the one below is not a simple process, but I hope you can see where shooting in RAW allows you to make some non destructive, but highly pliable changes to an image.

Questions?

I skimmed the surface of this issue, and if you already know about all of this then you know that I left out a lot of the more technical and sometimes overwhelming number of things that are involved with shooting RAW. I didn’t even touch the topic of how all manufacturers have their own versions of RAW, so if you have any questions that you would like answered, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.