Digital Facts

Why shoot RAW

There are several reasons why it is a better choice to shoot your photographs in RAW format:

1. When the height light is quite strong. This may happen on a bright, sunny day
2. When there is a mixture of different light sources that makes it difficult for the camera to set the white balance. This may happen when there is a mixture of flash and tungsten.
3. When you want to concentrate on your composition and subject and take care of the exposure and other camera settings afterwards.
4. When you want to have the advantage of higher resolution for larger prints and image sizes.

Some of the advantages of RAW Format

A RAW file is comparable to the un-developed piece of film. It holds exactly what the imaging chip recorded. Nothing more; nothing less. This means the photographer is able to extract the maximum possible image quality, either now or in the future.

RAW files have not had white balance set. They are tagged with whatever the camera's setting is, (whether it was either manually set or via auto white balance), but the actual data has not been changed. This allows one to set any colour temperature and white balance one wishes after the fact with no image degradation. It should be understood that once the file has been converted from the linear space and has had a gamma curve applied (such as in a JPEG) white balance can no longer be properly done.

The RAW file is tagged with contrast and saturation information as set in the camera by the user, but the actual image data has not been changed. The user is free to set these based on a per-image evaluation rather than use one or two generalized settings for all images taken.

Possibly the biggest advantage of shooting raw is that one has a 16 bit image (post raw conversion) to work with. This means that the file has 65,536 levels to work with. This is opposed to a JPEG file's 8 bit space with just 256 brightness levels available. This is important when editing an image, particularly if one is trying to open up shadows or alter brightness in any significant way.