Scott Wood Photoblog

Does your camera have a setting to shoot in RAW? If it does, do you use it? If not, why not?

Ok, for 99.9% those of you that use point & shoot digital cameras, this will not apply to you, YET. If you have a DSLR camera though, pay attention.

All digital cameras give you the ability to create JPG files that you download to your computer. This is basically the same as taking a roll of film to the drug store in the old days and getting a bunch of prints back. DSLR cameras, and some newer point & shoot cameras, give you the ability to shoot in something called RAW. You can think of RAW as taking your roll of film and developing it yourself.

At this point you are probably thinking that you are happy with the JPG images that come out of your camera, and that you don’t see the need to take the time to process a RAW image to make a good print out of it.

Take a look at the image at the beginning of this post. The top half is the way that the image came out of my Nikon D200. At first glance it might look ok, but it is terribly over exposed. There is no detail in the main bolt of lightning, and it very washed out. The bottom half of the image is the exact same capture, but I did some aggressive editing in Adobe Camera Raw to bring the exposure down to a level that I could use to get a decent image.

Ok, the bottom image isn’t great either, but it is at least usable, unlike the top half which is almost a waste of pixels.

If I had shot this image in JPG format, there is no way I would have been able to tweak it to a point of making it a usable image.

True, processing a RAW image to a JPG to share with the world takes some extra effort, but trust me, your effort will be rewarded the first time you are able to salvage that once in a lifetime photo.