Shoot RAW!

If your camera has a RAW setting you may just want to use it.  This is particularly important if the photograph is important to you and you want it to look it’s very best.  Here is why:

1) RAW format does not lose any information from the image during processing.
2) You can recover most, if not all, of the “hidden” info. from an image that doesn’t show up on your original using RAW.
3) JPEG format loses considerable information during processing due to the compression that takes place.
4) You’ll have limited ability to recover lost highlights/shadows with a JPEG/TIFF (vs. RAW)
5) RAW does not use compression.

Look at the comparison photo above. The highlights from the flame on the “before” photo are completely blow out. On the “after” photo they are rich with color. That was no surprise to me. The reason being the correct exposure for the flames would be much faster than the long exposure required for the remainder of the picture. From experience I knew Adobe Raw had the ability to recover blown out highlights quite well. So I tried a test shot and it worked beautifully.

Just by moving a slider in Adobe Raw I was able to not only recover those hidden colors in the flame but, frankly, it exceeded my expectations. Many rich colors came to life and the entire photo ended up the way I saw it with the human eye before I took the picture.

Now later versions of Adobe Photoshop have the ability to recover shadows and highlights but it’s very limited, unlike RAW. In Photoshop go to IMAGE – ADJUST – SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS. Play with the sliders. You’ll see that your ability to recover a highlight is no where near what you’re seeing above. As for recovering shadows you’ll end up with considerable noise if you push it too far. There is just no comparison between the two.

What’s the downside of RAW? Large file size vs. Jpegs (& the various sized megabyte settings you can give to a JPEG image). I do believe, however, that TIFF is a slightly larger file size than RAW. Today’s computers come with gigabytes of storage and there are external hard drives and clouds you can put images on. As a result I shoot almost everything in RAW these days and reap the benefits of this powerful software.

One last word. If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop or Adobe RAW then your camera may have come with it’s own proprietary software program. Check the disk that came with your camera. Happy shooting!