Jumat, 28 September 2012

Photography - Working With a DSLR Camera's RAW Format

If you own and shoot using a DSLR then you should be shooting in RAW. RAW is the native format that your camera stores information as. Even if you shoot in JPEG mode, your camera will still shoot in RAW, convert to JPEG and then discard the information left over.

This means that a RAW image can be up to four times the size of a JPEG image, but that extra information can be priceless. Since I began shooting in RAW, the results of my photos have been outstanding.

I'm not one to boast, but I am very proud of several photos I have taken, all because I was able to manipulate the RAW image in the post processing stage. Once you are hooked on shooting in RAW, you'll need to get a bigger hard drive and SD card. Prices of these are quite low compared to what they used to be, and this makes RAW an even more attractive format to shoot in.

Your camera is likely to have come with some software, including a RAW editor. If you're lucky and have any of Adobe's design suites or stand alone Photoshop, then you'll find that it has a RAW editor called Adobe RAW. This is normally accessed from the Adobe Bridge software, which is a brilliant image management system.

When you open a RAW image, you have several tabs you can look through, and each plays a specific role in the post processing stage of your image (yes, all your good images should always be post processed, just as with a film camera). Even if you only focus on the main tab to begin with, then you'll find it useful enough to really spruce up your shots well.

Out of all the controls, my favorite is the clarity slider. It works as a sharpness control, and can really make your shots stand out, or if you slide it back, to create low contrast and more atmospheric shots. It really depends on what you want to achieve.

This main tab also allows you to correct under or over exposure if your image is too dark or light. It can also allow you to change the temperature, so if you've taken an outdoor shot with a tungsten white balance setting on your camera, you can fix this by bringing more warmth into the image.

It also allows you to boost or put back dark areas, and also control your bright areas too.

Once you've played with it for a while and seen the results, you'll never go back to saving your images as JPEGS on your camera. One final benefit of RAW, the file format is lossless, therefore the image will never degrade, and you can also go back and undo any changes you've made at a later date because the changes aren't actually made onto the RAW image, moreover a separate file is created with the information of changes made.

In all, shooting in RAW gives you so much more power and control. The main disadvantages with it are the large size, and the fact you have to use Bridge to view the images (you can't get previews in Windows Explorer), but the benefits for outweigh these minor drawbacks. So shoot in RAW, take a spare SD card.

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