Raw Images: 10 things every beginner must know before ditching JPEG

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Pros and cons of shooting raw images

The pros

• Gives the potential for higher-quality images
• Non-destructive editing as standard, so you are not losing image data
• You get more highlight/shadow detail than with a standard JPEG
• Greater scope for post-shoot adjustment – colour, white balance, sharpening and so on

The cons

• Larger files than JPEG
• Slower to write to your memory card, and fills the buffer faster
• It takes more time to edit and process raw images
• You need to save raw images as JPEG or another format to print them
• It takes some getting used to

What you can and can’t adjust in raw

Settings you can change

• Exposure compensation
• White balance
• Noise reduction
• Sharpness

Settings you can’t change

• Aperture
• Shutter speed
• ISO
• Focus

Raw format can be confusing, so here’s a quick guide to help you get your head around shooting and editing raw images.

Many cameras allow you to manually convert raw images in camera, enabling you to share or print the images

 All images in your camera start life as raw images

When you fire the shutter, the image is recorded on your camera’s sensor, where the light is converted into an electrical signal that forms the image data.

It’s then combined with the information needed to build the image and written to your memory card.

With a JPEG, however, before the image is written to the card, the original raw data is processed. How it’s processed depends on what camera settings you’ve chosen.

The file is then converted to JPEG format and finally written to your memory card.

Your camera produces raw images, but it’s up to you whether you let it process these for you into a JPEG or stick with a raw file.

1.

02 You need to select raw on your camera

Most cameras will automatically shoot in JPEG mode, so you have to tell the camera to shoot in raw. How you do this depends on the camera.

On most DSLRs and Compact System Cameras, you do it via an option in the menu (it’s usually found under Picture Quality or a similar setting – your manual can tell you exactly). Some newer cameras may have a dedicated button for selecting raw.

Once this is done, you can start firing away. On some Canon SLRs, such as the EOS 60D and above, there are three raw file options called raw, mraw and sraw. These are simply different resolutions for the raw file you capture.

Raw is the full-resolution file (for example 18MP with the EOS 7D), while mraw is 10MP and sraw is 4.5MP.

These lower-resolution settings allow you to save space on your memory card if you know that you aren’t going to need to use the camera’s full resolution (to make enlargements, for example), but still want to make the most of the benefits of raw shooting.

On many Nikon cameras above the D7000 you also have a couple of settings for raw images, enabling you to set the level of compression or number of bits. Just remember, more bits, bigger file size!

2.

Raw lets you fine-tune your images

The ability to fine-tune white balance in raw is great for warming- up your portraits

Most of your camera’s settings, such as white balance, sharpening and saturation, are not applied to a raw file, so you are free to adjust and fine-tune them on your computer.

raw images also contain much more picture information than JPEGs, especially with regards to tonal range.

This means that any tonal transitions, particularly in areas of similar tone or colour, are much smoother, and are much less prone to problems like banding and pixelation when any raw adjustments are made.

3.

Raw images can slow down your shoots

The many useful advantages that raw images offer come at a price. raw images are typically three to five times larger than even the most high-quality JPEG, so you won’t be able to squeeze as many images onto a memory card if you’re shooting entirely in raw.

They also fill the camera’s buffer faster, meaning that the burst rate can drop significantly when shooting raw.

If your project specifically requires that you need to fire off shots at a very fast rate, using raw can cause problems, and seriously eat into your speed.

This is why sports and some news photographers, who need to take, edit and send shots really quickly, frequently opt for the speed and convenience of JPEG, rather than wait around for the more editable but cumbersome raw images.

The JPEG images may not be as manageable out of the camera as the raw shots, but often speed is more important than quality.

4.

05 Raw images let you rescue detail

The extra information contained in raw images compared with JPEGs means that they are much better at dealing with high-contrast scenes.

Although it’s possible to boost the shadow detail in a JPEG, this often comes with a large increase in image noise, and you don’t always want that on your images.

With a raw file, you can reveal shadow detail and still achieve high-quality results.

You can use the highlight recovery tools in Photoshop CS or Photoshop Elements to get a little more highlight detail from a JPEG image, but you’ll recover much more if you shoot raw.

Remember, the files contain more information to start with, which can then be recovered using raw-conversion software.

5.

Not all raw images are the same

Unlike JPEGs, there isn’t a standard for the raw images produced by most of the cameras made by big-name manufacturers.

Each of them has its own distinct raw file format, and even more confusingly, each model of camera has its own version of this format.

So, current Canon cameras will produce a raw file with a .cr2 suffix, and the raw file from an EOS 650D SLR will actually be slightly different to one from an EOS 7D.

To further confuse matters, there is an exception to this rule. DNG is a file format developed by Adobe that can be used by any manufacturer.

But of the main DSLR manufacturers only Pentax has included it on its cameras up to now.

Even if you use another brand of camera, DNG can still be a useful format to consider, because it can be used as a way of opening raw images from new cameras in old versions of Photoshop and Elements.

6.

You need special software to view

Because a raw file is just a package of data rather than a specific image format, your computer doesn’t immediately know what to do with it.

Unlike a standard format, such as JPEG, a raw file doesn’t contain the information needed for your PC to decode it.

Think of it like the words on a page: the JPEG file is like the finished article containing words, paragraphs and all of the correct punctuation, which means that you can read it easily and make perfect sense out of it.

Raw is like having all of the same letters written down, but not necessarily in the same order, no consistent spacing, and without a structure that you can easily understand.

Even the image you see on the back of the camera when reviewing a photo – and the brightness histogram that goes with it – is a JPEG representation of the raw file, based on the settings used at the time of shooting.

7.

Raw images offer non- destructive editing

The non-destructive nature of raw means that you can return to an image and tweak its sharpening

When you save a JPEG or single-layer TIFF image after editing, all the data from the original file is discarded and re-written.

So once you have closed the image, all of the original data is lost.

When you edit a raw file, the new settings are stored alongside the original data.

These settings can be inside the file, or stored in a separate file, which is used by the editing software to remember your last settings.

So you can adjust your original setting indefinitely.

8.

Make selective adjustments

Adobe Camera Raw is the industry standard software for raw conversion, and it is available in Photoshop and Elements (and is also mirrored in Lightroom’s Develop module).

Adjustments made in Adobe Camera Raw were limited before the arrival of Photoshop CS4, in that you could only apply them to the entire image.

But with the introduction of the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush, Adobe Camera Raw suddenly became a whole lot more useful.

In Adobe Camera Raw version 7 (which comes as standard with CS6) the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter tools have been improved with extra options to adjust white balance.

This makes it easy to selectively correct white balance in order to warm or cool an image.

9.

You can expand dynamic range by combining raw conversions

In high-contrast lighting, your camera sensor may not be able to record detail in the dark or bright areas of a picture (or indeed both).

By converting the same image twice, each time adjusting the exposure of the shot to deal with high-contrast lighting, you can produce an image that shows detail in all areas.

For landscape photography, the effect is similar to using a graduated Neutral Density lens filter to darken the top half of your image, but you have much more control over the transition between the two exposures.

10.

Raw conversion software options

A quick guide to your choices for opening and editing raw images

Opening a raw image is not always an easy process, as you need special software to convert and edit the files (unlike a JPEG, which every image-viewing program can open).

The first port of call should be your camera’s box, to see if raw-editing software was supplied.

For greater power and flexibility, try Adobe Camera Raw – the free plug-in you get with Photoshop CS or Elements. Here are your raw editor options:

• Software supplied by the camera manufacturer (Canon’s Digital Photo Professional is the best such program we’ve seen)
• Third-party raw converters
• Combined raw converter/image-management software (eg Adobe Lightroom/or Capture One)
  
  
  
  
  Source:http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/05/28/raw-images-10-tips-every-beginner-must-know-before-ditching-jpeg/12/