An obvious question for some

mikeanywhere

This will most likely be obvious to some of you "pros" out there so excuse the newbie question.

I read that a lot of people shoot RAW when outside to be able to PS (or similar) for editing etc.

I know that when I have taken pics in JPEG I am still able to do a lot of stuff in PS. So why do it in the first place, does RAW allow you to do a lot more??

Cheers

mloc

http://www.photos-of-the-year.com/raw/

that explains most of the reasons.

edit:

also this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_file

rymus

handy link

elderlemon

I shoot raw because I make a lot of mistakes Raw is how the ccd sees the image so if you screw up something like white belance you can simply correct it later.

mikeanywhere wrote:

This will most likely be obvious to some of you "pros" out there so excuse the newbie question.

I read that a lot of people shoot RAW when outside to be able to PS (or similar) for editing etc.

I know that when I have taken pics in JPEG I am still able to do a lot of stuff in PS. So why do it in the first place, does RAW allow you to do a lot more??

Cheers

mikeanywhere

Thanks for the info so far and the links too

po0k

So it makes all the [back-end] image-processing features on the camera effectively useless, replaced by PhotoShop?

Valentia

SyxPak wrote:

So it makes all the [back-end] image-processing features on the camera effectively useless, replaced by PhotoShop?

Well, no. Most people dont use RAW. Just like the old days really. Most people left the film in with the chemist and couldnt figure out why their results were crap. Serious photographers developed and printed their own stuff. They didn't want to depend on someone else interpreting what the end product should look like. RAW gives a person the same opportunity. It is the digital equivalent of a negative.

Fionn

i've only recently started to shoot in RAW format but I find that some photographs i've taken where my settings weren't exactly optimum can be made usable because of the way the RAW format stores all the digital information that was recorded by the sensor when the photograph was taken, thereby allowing me to adjust such things as the exposure, temperature tint and colour settings that would be lost had i shot in JPG format. So it's much more felxible than any format that compresses your photos.