Tipped Off: Why Shoot RAW?

By: Patrick Gensel

If you are new to the digital SLR scene, you might have heard the term RAW tossed around from time to time, but what exactly does it mean, and do you need it? The short answers: RAW is just that, The raw image as the camera sees it without any compression or alteration. Do you need it? Not necessarily, but it will make you life easier if you do a lot of post production. Lets look at the benefits of shooting and using RAW.

1. Non Destructive Editing – Let’s say for the sake of this topic that you just shot the photo in Jpeg format, copied it to your computer and then spent several hours editing it. You really liked the end results, so you saved it and went on with your life. Fast forward six months! Now you look at the photo again and aren’t completely happy with the way it looks. The original file is long gone because you didn’t back it up(A topic for another post) and you want to make considerable changes to the coloring and exposure. The initial problem is that since it is shot in JPEG you don’t quite have as much control over these things as you would with RAW. The big concern though is that JPEG photos degrade in quality when they are edited or duplicated so doing further color or exposure correction could compromise the quality of the photo. With RAW, you could just reset the photo to the way it was originally shot, edit it, then export the final product as a JPEG. Software such as Canon’s Digital Photo Professional, or Adobe Lightroom allows you to do this.
2. Presets, Presets! – In many of the RAW processing suites such as Adobe Lightroom, you have the ability to create presets based on settings and changes you have made to a photo. Creating a preset will help in speeding up the process of post processing a group of photos that have similar qualities such as lighting, location and so on.
3. Dynamic Range – Dynamic Range is the range between the lightest and darkest parts of a photograph. RAW provides more of that light information for you to work with than a compressed JPEG image.  As long as you are mindful of over exposure, Shooting in RAW will provide you with the much more information to work with.
4. Various Output Formats – Shooting in RAW is great for post production, because you have a limitless list of potential output formats for your work. JPEG, TIF, PNG and the list goes on. Versatility is the word here.

A few downsides.

1. File Sizes – There is no other way to put this, RAW files are BIG! be sure to have a large card for your camera and plenty of hard drive space if you are shooting RAW.
2. Future Compatibility – Camera RAW is not standardized across all brands and there is no guarantee that any one iteration of camera RAW will be supported in the future.

So as you can see, the pros clearly out weigh the cons when it comes to camera RAW. Of course, it all come down to what you ultimately want to do with your photos. If you have no desire to change anything on your images, then shooting in RAW will only add unnecessary steps to your process, but if you intend to make changes, or one day hope to edit your photos, then perhaps shooting in RAW would suit you well.