Tag Archives: camera raw

While DSLR cameras are getting more and more affordable, it seems that less and less people are taking the time to actually learn how to use their shiny new toy to it’s full potential. Just buying a nice camera will not improve your photos that much. Which is why, over the course of the next little while at least, I’m going to be writing some short and sweet tips on how to improve your photos with very little effort, simply by taking full advantage of your camera’s capabilities. I’ll be calling (and tagging) these articles “Back to Basics” for future reference.

Shooting in Camera RAW

The "Camera RAW" editing window.

Your camera should have several quality settings, whether they’re called “good, better, best” or “small, medium, large” or whatever, and are usually in some form of compressed image, like a JPEG. Find the setting to change it, and crank it all the way to the maximum, which SHOULD be “RAW”. (NOTE: Some cameras have multiple RAW options, always use the one that leaves you with the least amount of availible photos, and thus the largest file size per photo, for the best results)

This is basically telling the camera to save all the information regarding what it is doing when you take a photo and saving it all, rather than guessing at how you want to deal with it and doing the compression into a JPEG for you…losing potientially valuable information in the process. This extra information is what makes the RAW format so useful, as I will demonstrate with an old photo from a poorly lit New Year’s Eve party.

When you open up a photo in RAW format(I would suggest using Adobe Bridge, but that’s just a personal preference), you have a lot of options to modify and potentially enhance the quality of an image that you wouldn’t have with the usual JPEG formats.

Notice how dark the photo is? Typical party lighting is a serious pain to deal with accurately (especially without blinding everyone with the flash, which I wouldn’t suggest if you want to be invited back). With camera RAW though, we get all sorts of tools to help this photo crawl out of the dark and into much better condition (among other things, like white balance correction and more complex things that will come later). Simply play with the “Exposure”, “Brightness”, and in this case “Vibrance” a little, and you’ll see just how drastically a few simple sliders can improve the quality of the photo far beyond what you could do to a JPEG…without also drastically reducing the general quality of the photo at least. A few tweaks and a click on the “SAVE” button later, and we end up with something more like the photo below.

The enhanced photo. Aprox 5 seconds of work.

The brightness is fixed, the colours stand out more, and there was absolutely no more work put into the taking of the photo. The biggest advantage of shooting in the “RAW” format is the flexibly. You don’t have to get every shot perfect, and can get great results much more easily. The goal of course is to improve enough that you don’t often need to do much (or any) tweaking to most of your photos, but a safety net never hurt anyone. You don’t have to use it every time, but if you aren’t shooting in “RAW”, you won’t have the option when you really need it.