Friday, October 26, 2012

Shooting in RAW: Why You Should If You Have a DSLR

When you first get a DSLR, you may hear and wonder what shooting in raw is all about? When you take a photo using a camera, it usually saves it in a JPEG format. This is a good file format for saving space but the trade-off is that you lose some quality.

The RAW format is almost like a "digital negative". While it takes up more space on your memory card, you are able to retain more detail in the photo as well as alter things like exposure and white balance after you've taken the photo. It also bypasses any of the camera's built in processing so you're left with an image that is a much closer representation to the actual scene in terms of light, colour and shadow!

Some of the most beneficial things about shooting in RAW are:

    Post processing: after shooting your photo when you come to edit it on the computer you can change settings that you might have gotten wrong or not quite right. Did you under-expose the picture? Not a problem, you can ramp up the exposure with a RAW file. Got the wrong white balance setting or maybe the image has a colour tint you're not quite happy with. You can edit these and much more with a RAW file afterwards

    Quality: when you shoot in RAW you are letting the camera take the best quality photos, and not worrying about how much space it might take up. This lets the camera take a photo without having to perform any lossy compression and means you'll have more details in the photo when you are zoomed in 100%. It also lends itself better to sharpening which is something you might perform on your image.

    Workflow: the workflow for RAW files is a lot better than editing with a JPG. There are many more options to non-destructively edit your image, and because of all the additional info the file has about when the photo was taken it gives you the photographer a lot more scope for post processing.

Hopefully these points are reason enough for you to turn your DSLR's image format to RAW and give it a go! You might be surprised at the larger file sizes but when you've spent a day shooting in RAW and sit down to edit your photos; it will be so much easier to get your photos looking the way you want!

I'm a photographer and DSLR enthusiast, I also run http://www.digitalslrcameras.co.uk

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