Why Shoot RAW Format Photography?

Why Shoot RAW Format Photography?

Using RAW you can save or improve shots that otherwise might be lack luster:

Here is a shot taken with a Canon EOS 5D on a trip up the Columbia River Gorge:

The camera had some of the settings changed without the knowledge of the photographer.

Luckily the image was saved in RAW format.

The photographer R A DuBois was able to bring the image back to life using software, in this case Photoshop CS3:

What an amazing difference!

- Images Copyright 2008 R A DuBois -

RAW: RAW is basically the direct dump from the sensor.
Likely there is more to it than that, but this is simple way to begin to think about RAW.

This allows you, the artist, to process a raw image in a wide-gamut and the internal colorspace of the sensor data, where precise or dramatic adjustments can be made before conversion. Conversion to an RGB file format such as TIFF or JPEG is needed for storage, printing, or further manipulation.

By shooting RAW you have avoided a level of pre-processing usually done by a chip on the camera.
You retain all the data of the shot captured by the sensor, including what would have been thrown away by the pre-processing chip. Plus, the white balance is not set (ingrained) into the image, and for most current sensors you get 16-bit rather than JPG 8-bit.

Digital Negatives: If you never change the raw files but instead save them as digital negatives, you will always have the full data of the shot. Just SAVE A COPY or do a SAVE AS or EXPORT instead. One nice thing about RAW is that you can tweak the image hundreds of times and the RAW file remains unchanged, waiting for new and improved methods of correction.

Why Not JPG?: JPG is not a loss-less format. JPG is a lossy format, thus there is loss of data in order to achieve compression and smaller file size. This format is useful for many things, like posting images on the net. You can always SAVE A COPY of your RAW image to JPG. This requires extra steps yet preserves your digital negatives. JPG is definitely worth using for many things, like product shots that you will no longer need the digital negatives for in the future. Like why go through all the extra steps and have huge image sizes for images of something you just want to list once on ebay?

The Sigma comes with special software for working with the RAW files that the camera produces. Each model of sensor that camera manufacturers use, creates unique data. Special software is needed, or software that has been programed to work with that data.

VitalBodies will be using UFRaw and the special Sigma software called Sigma Photo Pro.

RADICAL RAW RESOURCES:

• Sigma Photo Pro: How To Install Sigma Photo Pro In Ubuntu…
• UFRaw: UFRaw can function standalone or as a plug in for GIMP.
• DCRAW: http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format