It's nearly December, so no - I'm not advocating we all get nekkid and start snapping away - too cold! But as the blog title implies, when it comes time to setting the file format on your DSLR - RAW is the only way to go.
For a photographer working with digital media - the saved file is the equivalent of your exposed negative, so we all really want to be capturing and saving the maximum amount of information from the camera sensor as possible. All digital cameras in every shape and size, will offer you a range of saving options that will dictate the amount of picture information saved to the memory card.
Most people save small files - keep the same card in the camera forever and never take their images off and store them. If this sounds like you, there's nothing wrong with that - I'm sure scrolling through 8 billion images each time you want to find one has the long winter nights flying by! But if you want to keep your images safe and work on them after shooting - the camera RAW file format is your best bet.
So what's wrong with jpeg you say? well, nothing really, it has it's place - for instance, it's a really good format for online use or for uploading an image to a stock library, but the jpeg format doesn't capture all the file data that you will get from a RAW file and is far less useful when you want to edit it later.
A camera RAW file will allow you the opportunity to edit your file in many more ways than a jpeg. Your jpeg files will have had some compression added to them by the setting you've selected and this can affect the quality quite badly. If you've ever looked at an image file that has weird pixellation around the edges of things - it's usually down to jpeg compression artifacts - here's an example:
In contrast to this, your camera's RAW file will be fully editable and you can open it into one of the many applications that will allow you a far greater level of control over your finished image. My personal weapon of choice is Adobe Photoshop which offers the full control of opening your files in Adobe Camera Raw, but Nikon's own "View NX 2 software that came with my camera is pretty good too (I'm sure Canon, Pentax, Sony etc come with good software too).
Here are some of the benefits that working with your camera's raw files will offer you:
1 - It will be the biggest file that your camera can capture - why take smaller images? Memory cards are cheap as chips and it's good practice to use a few in rotation anyway just in case one fails.
2 - You will be able to control noise much more effectively in camera raw.
3. You can easily remove lens aberrations such as barrel distortion on wide angle images, vignetting around the image edges and colour fringing.
4. You are able to adjust the exposure before opening your file fully for editing - very handy!
5. You can alter the white balance of your image, so if you have accidentally left the white balance set for indoor lighting and then spent all day taking landscape shots outdoor - you can correct the hideous colour cast that will be on all your images (No, I haven't done this - but it's only a matter of time and you'll be able to hear the swearing).
6. You have far greater control over colour adjustments like "Vibrance", "Saturation", "Contrast", "Fill Light" and black levels.
7. You can use the "Recover" option to better control any black and white "clipping" in the image - that's where all the detail will be lost in total shadow or blown out to white highlights. The slider allows you to put back the detail in these areas.
8. Opening a RAW file will give you the ability to tailor several exposures of the same image, processing each version for a different result before merging them into a single file. This gives you the ability for example, to process a landscape shot for the foreground exposure and again for the sky, which would typically be bleached out - then merge the two.
9. If you shoot RAW, you can archive your raw file and your processed version so you will always have access to the original.
10. It's comedy gold for all sorts of "naked shooting" double entendres
So there you go - after all that, if you're still saving your files as fun sized jpegs, what is wrong with you people, get with the program here and start doing it in the raw!
You know you want to!
As usual, if you're enjoying this stuff at all - let me know and please click the "follow" link. Happy shooting!
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