Comments on: A Good Argument for Shooting in RAW [HOW I TOOK IT]

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 04:14:03 +0000

Do Professionals consider shooting in RAW cheating?

By: John Belmont

John Belmont — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:43:08 +0000

Sure, when I began DSLR I used JPG ’cause that was the default. Then a friend told me about how RAW had much greater bit depth. His argument was that someday the printers would catch up with RAW bit depth and I’d be glad I had those RAW files to go back to. So, add that to the question of white balance (I use a white card regularly in situ because it’s a no-brainer that you should maximize image quality in the camera, but still I sometimes work on the white balance post process). For convenience I shoot max RAW and smallest JPG simultaneously (Canon D50). I use the JPGs as proofs that remain on my laptop, but shuffle the RAWs off to an external drive and back them up to a second and a third external drive. Having those little proofs to look at first is a huge time saver. For printing, I generally select from among the proofs, then bring up the corresponding RAW as a TIF in PS4. After post I generally make a small JPG of the final TIF image, just for emailing. The TIF is not a compressed format and so is not degraded by repeated openings and savings, whereas the JPG is recompressed and hence re-degraded with each successive saving. So, the TIFs become my printing files, and although they run 88 megs each, that’s worth every bit. External drives are cheap and effective in this flow.

By: Edward Montague

Edward Montague — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:28:19 +0000

Is there a freeware program to post process RAW photographs?
I use a Nikon D300, and my Brother-in-Law insists that I should be shooting in RAW to gain maximum advantage of the cameras full potential.
I can’t afford Photoshop CS4.

By: Steve A

Steve A — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:13:14 +0000

Hey there,

Wow, I had no idea my post on the forum would be picked up and posted here by the editors OR what a reaction it would get.

I posted this as an extreme example of the flexibility of Raw files and how much detail you can actually recover from such an under exposed shot. Nowhere did I mention that I did not know what I had done wrong ‘in camera’ nor did I tell anyone that they can just forget about learning how to take a picture correctly first time, so for everyone who replied from atop their high horses – thank you for your input, but you have missed the point I was trying to make.

For those of you who actually learned something about the capabilities of the Raw format over JPEG from reading this then I’m glad to have helped

By: willer

willer — Sun, 03 May 2009 18:19:25 +0000

wow! first time here, and saw a long discussion but i read few of it on top,
First of all, I having both film and digital SLR, one shot without post processing are sound to be a pro, but my answer is RAW. I will pay more $$ for storage to get RAW. why?

1st) I only care about producing good picture (the final outcome)… I can pay less to hire newbie to shoot good picture for me

2nd) for me, the difference between RAW and those compressed/fixed format, it just how good you control your “camera” software and “PC” software…. ( see this http://photo.net/learn/raw/ )

By: Edsar

Edsar — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:18:54 +0000

@ Ben,

Normally you are able to open the RAW format to photoshop CS3 with out using any bridge or something, you can simply open the file with RAW format and drag it to photoshop and there it is… presto it will give a heck of option to edit your picture.

As im a newbie as well and trying hard to understand how this one works better…
Regards to all, keep shooting

By: DAVID MCCLEAN

DAVID MCCLEAN — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:09:58 +0000

Just recently been getting your emails and am amazed at the additional knowledge
that | have gained in a short while -love the site-david

By: ben

ben — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:57:48 +0000

hi
i shoot some pics in raw but i couldnt open them with photoshop cs3…
do you have any idea why this is so?
do i need adobe bridge to open raw files in photoshop?

it’d be great if you could answer me!!

greets
ben

By: Lu

Lu — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:04:50 +0000

Until recently I was a proponent for shooting in JPG. I got tired of post processing and preferred mastering my camera and shooting techniques. When I used to shoot 30 or 60 photos at a time it was fun to tweak my photos afterwards. After purchasing my DSLR, and shooting tripled to 180 and more shots, I lacked the time.

Last month I gave Raw a shot during a New Year’s celebration indoors and I was sold on Raw. I fooled around with different apertures, shutter speeds, etc… and was able to dramatically improve many shots. The downside as others have expressed is the amount of time involved. I only tweaked the brightness, but after converting the Raw to JPG for every single photo, you can imagine the increased amount of time.

In summary, if you have the time and inclination, you can’t go wrong with shooting in Raw. Although JPG saves a lot of space and time, I could never justify missing out the opportunity to save an improperly shot photograph.

By: Philip G Daikens

Philip G Daikens — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:32:02 +0000

Sorry, my sequence was off on the previous comment. From the camera software I convert the RAW image to TIFF 16 bit then go to Photoshop for refining the details. Save the same photo in JPEG and TIFF 16 bit then compare, the difference is amazing.