The Basics of RAW files {and what to do with the darn things}

by Tri-County Photography

I was shooting a wedding once and the father-of-the-bride ‘knew a lot about photography’. I was literally laughing out loud (trying so terribly hard to hold it in) when I would adjust the dials and hear him say over my shoulder “mmmm oh yes you’re probably changing the white balance hmmm?” And best of all, “if you’re really professional you shoot in raw.”

RAW. It’s the ultimate test of someone’s acceptance of your status as a professional because it’s one of the first things that a mildly keen just-starting-out-er will pick up on in their search for photography knowledge. But even though it’s one of the first things you’ll likely learn, it’s also one of the most confusing elements for a beginner.

I’m a control freak. I don’t want to work my butt off to pull every element of an image together and then lose control of my color temp in post processing. I want to control everything about the final product. If it were possible, I would even come to every single one of your houses and calibrate the world’s computer screens to see things exactly the same. Before you can love raw, you have to understand it.





{Basically…}

■If you’re shooting in jpeg and you hit the shutter to let all the beautiful light flood your sensor and record the image onto your memory card, the camera collects the information and quickly compresses it down into a reasonably sized file. It judges things like the color of the sky and the temperature of the light. Even when you’ve taken the image in manual mode and set everything yourself, the jpeg still needs to make some decisions as it smooshes all that information into one little file.

■But if you shoot in raw, the sensor stays hands-off and says “ok, hot shot. YOU deal with it!”

■…this means that you have total, blissful control of your entire image.

■…but not without some work of your own.

■RAW files need to be imported into a computer program like Adobe LightRoom or Adobe Camera Raw (those seem to be the popular ones, personally I use Olympus Master and Corel PaintShop Pro Photo 12) and then either instantly exported as jpegs (yikes!)

■…or perfected according to your vision for the image with editing and then exported as a jpg or other printer-friendly format.

■So just to make sure you get it I’ll say it this way: a raw file isn’t an image. Its information gathered by the sensor and delivered to you on a memory card. It’s totally your job to then do what you want with that information before compressing it into an ‘image’.

■Also, a raw file won’t usually have included the in-camera sharpening that jpeg compression provides. So don’t fret when you think your image isn’t as sharp as it should be – this also needs to be done by you in the post production editing process.



I will add some helpful links to software and tutorials, to supliment this article, in the near future.

Happy Shooting!!

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