I’ve been going back and forth on the “shooting in raw” question for a while. Raw is the native format of whatever camera you are using – and it is different for every camera. It is uncompressed, like PNG’s and TIFF’s, unlike the compressed JPEG format. And, since it saves much more information from your camera, it allows for some nice adjustments after the fact.
For instance, the color experiments from the last post were all shot in raw, and it would have been impossible to see the information on color temperature and tint without the right format. Also, it was much quicker to shoot because I didn’t have to re-set the white balance to the color of the light source before I shot every color card.
Besides white balance, raw format allows you to make other changes after the fact: sharpening, saturation, and contrast. It’s fun messing with these changes to give photos a whole new look.
(The picture on the left is shot with the same white balance as the garden picture in my last post, on the right, I let Adobe Lightroom select a white balance, which looks pretty correct.)
I work in a digital humanities center in a library, so I know all about lossless image formats and why archives use them. I also really like the control raw gives me. But, for the most part, I won’t be shooting in raw for the foreseeable future, for the following reasons:
1: It’s slow. Using raw adds a lot of time to the process. Downloading, processing, everything takes a little longer. That might be because my two year old computer is somewhat old in computer years, but I’m not ready to buy something newer and faster yet.
2: I don’t actually want to spend a lot of time fiddling with my images on the computer. I spend all day at work on the computer, so I’m always looking for ways to minimise my screen time at home. What started this whole process was that I wanted to figure out to make images closer to perfect in the camera, so shooting raw so I have a safety net kind of takes away from that.
3: They take up a lot of room. A jpeg right out of the camera is 5 mp compared to 25 megs for raw. I know space is cheap, but I already have 115 GB of images and have a hard time getting everything stored and backed up. If space is an issue and you like shooting in raw and fiddling with images, you can always save to jpeg and only save the raw images that are really spectacular.
4: The software costs more. At least with canon, I don’t really like the software that comes with the camera, and lightroom, aperture, etc cost a lot. (I’m using a 30 day free trial of aperture right now.) I also find the software clunky after years of using picasa but again, slow computer. My older version of photoshop won’t even open my camera’s native raw photos (yes, even with the latest plugin.) This kind of incompatibility makes me wonder if I’d be able to open these photos in the future, as well.
5: Honestly, I just can’t tell the difference. I compare this to the fact that I can’t tell the difference between FLAC and MP3′s. I’m just not very discerning, I guess. I’ve printed jpegs out at 13×19, I’ve imported jpegs into photoshop’s raw editing program, I’ve made repeated changes, and only when zooming waaaay in on my screen do I see a difference. With 18mp pictures, you would have to print or view a picture very large to see the degradation, and given that I’m a) not a professional and b) still learning, I don’t think I will have any shots that really necessitate that.
I still might shoot in raw when I’m experimenting, need a really wide dynamic range, or shooting something really important, but chances are for now I’ll just save them right out to jpeg once I’m done processing and delete the raw images.