I started shooting in RAW. Since all the magazines I read banged on about how important it is. I decided to comply.
I should have been shooting in raw since forever. There’s enough room on the card for it!
So, people with cameras, take it from someone who ignored the advice for a long time - SHOOT IN RAW! You’ll be glad you did/do. (If you don’t already)
One of the nice things about shooting RAW is that your images can improve in the future without having to change them, as processing algorithms get better. (Obviously, you could do it by hand — but most, if not all of the time you’ll let somebody else’s software do it for you.)
Also, run some compressed air through your computer to clean the dust out. You’ll be glad you did.
Interestingly, the reason I was taking photographs inside my computer was so that I could refer to the images when plugging the wires back in to the motherboard. I took all the wires out, then used one of these to blow off all the dust from the motherboard. Then put everything back.
I own a can of compressed air, but I think the rocket has a more powerful blast of useful air.
Yep, if you know what you’re doing, raw is freaking awesome. From the slightly more dynamic range you get to tweaking white balances after-the-fact without losing any information, it’s simply a godsend. It took me a few years to be convinced to use RAW, but with tools like Lightroom or Aperture and the insane cheapness of memory, there’s no good reason not to shoot raw files any more (unless you have an old, underpowered computer.) I’ve been shooting it exclusively since 2006 (probably over a quarter million raw files on my drives right now) and, after the initial learning curve, have never looked back. I often edit the photos of a colleague who shoots JPEGs, and I keep insisting for him to shoot raw, as it makes my life a lot easier.
All of my women shoot RAW.
OK, levity aside:
Yes, it’s better for the reasons pulykamell posted. Photoshop and Lightroom both ingest RAW expertly, and storage is cheap. If you have aspirations beyond cell phone photography, shoot RAW.
Can anybody recommend a good site — clear but simple — that helps with the learning curve? Most of what I’ve seen out there makes my eyes cross after the fourth sentence.
I wouldn’t go quite so far. I still know pros – mostly photojournalists – who do shoot JPEGs exclusively, partly because they’re a little stuck in their ways, but also because there is a slight time advantage in downloading a mess of JPEGs from your card to your camera versus downloading raw files, as well as the time it takes for the computer to process the files. Also, some sports shooters who have a tendency to really eat up their buffers will shoot JPEGs, because they can get 3-4 times as many photos on their cards before the camera will choke on the buffer.
But these are pretty specialized applications.
As for raw tutorials, I’ve picked it up from experimentation and just reading around. For Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, my workflow is as follows. Basically, and I don’t know, but this may be a little too technical even, adjust your white balance, use Exposure to set your white point, use Blacks to set your black point. Brightness gets your midtones in place. Then adjust contrast using either Contrast or (preferably) a combination of Contrast and Tone Curve.
Or hit Auto Tone, and then adjust from there.
Not to mention that if you’re on a deadline and the image is for newsprint … well, converting a JPG to TIFF is good enough.
I teach a beginner’s course in Adobe Photoshop, and in one of the textbooks, there is a chapter devoted to RAW photography. Not having a camera that allows me to do it, I haven’t had much chance to play around with it, but one of our instructors is a part-time paparazzi and has a pricey camera and shoots all of his photos using the RAW format. He has shown me some of his work (before and after fiddling with it in Photoshop), and it is amazing.
There appear to be quite a few advantages for photographers who want to get in there and really work on their shots - allowing far greater range for adapting photos. Word of warning - there is definitely a learning curve involved.
However, I think for the novice, this could be dangerous - the shots are memory hogs, so if you take lots and lots and start storing them on your laptop, you might suddenly find your hard-drive is full!
That said, if you start playing around with the technology, I think you will find it gives you far more control over your photos and most likely you won’t go back.
I am hoping the price of cameras that allow RAW photos will start coming down soon.
For an imperfect analogy, it’s a bit like the difference between shooting negatives and chromes (slides). Shooting JPEGs well teaches you great exposure discipline, because if you blow your exposure, you don’t have much room to fix your errors: if you overexpose and blow your highlights, your detail is gone, and you can’t do anything to get it back. RAWs have a much wider tolerance, and you can recover details that may be up to about a stop and a half overexposed for an equivalent JPEG. In that case, it’s a bit like negative film, which gives you significant exposure latitude vs slides. And similar exposure rules apply. If you’re going to err with slides or JPEGs, you generally want to err on the side of slight underexposure. With negs and raw files, you’ll usually want to err on the side of slight overexposure. Once you get to know your camera well and its exposure/dynamic range tolerances, you can purposely overexpose your image a little bit to eke out the maximum amount of information in your scene. I generally shoot my raw files up to a full stop over how I’d expose a JPEG.
I have been shooting RAW for about 3 years now and I don’t think I’m ever going back.
