What the hell is “Shooting in RAW” and why should I care?

Short answer:  Because your photos will turn out better. Long answer: It’s a bit complicated, but here goes. First, lets talk about digital cameras. Behind the lens is a contraption called a CCD (Charged Coupled Device) that acts as an image sensor.  It acts just like a piece of film. Basically, light hits it, and it records the information and transfers it to the the memory card in the camera as a picture. Simple so far.  Now, I want you to think of all the information that the CCD records as a deck of cards.  And lets use a photo’s brightness for this analogy.  If the deck of cards is on the table, each card is a picture with the bottom card being a really dark version, the top card is a really light version, and the 50 cards in the middle are varying degrees of light to dark. OK, with me so far?

Now, if you use a standard camera format that is not RAW, such as jpeg, here’s what happens. The camera shutter clicks, the light from the lens hits the CCD and it captures the visual information of the scene and transfers it to the deck of cards. There is more information that what you see in the digital window on the back of the camera. It actually collects lighter and darker versions. Then the camera decides what it thinks is the best picture, it pulls that card from the deck and throws away the rest.  Now this sounds easy.  You get a nice picture, all good. But what happens if the image camera picks is too dark, or too light.  You can try to make it lighter or darker with software But the camera threw away all the other cards, so how does the computer software know what a lighter image looks like.  The computer can fake it, to a point, but it is never that good. With RAW, the camera doesn’t decide, you decide.  The RAW file keeps all the 52 cards and lets you choose what is best.  And this isn’t true just for brightness, but exposure, contrast, color, shadows, sharpness etc.

To see what I mean, here is an illustration.  I took this photo at the Monkey Jungle. The first photo is a photo that is too dark.  I have saved it here as if it were taken with all the other cards thrown away.  You can see it is pretty dark, the area under his arm is black and you can’t even see details in his face.

Now, when I try to lighten it up in Photoshop, look at what happens.

The image is lighter, but look at all the areas that are just blown out white. His face didnt really get much lighter.  And there are these light blue areas. The reason for this is that there was not enough information about what was supposed to happen in those areas for Photoshop to extrapolate.  Also, the color is off throughout the picture, his hair look like a bad dye job. But, if the image was taken in RAW, you wouldn’t have this problem.  You have much more control.  Here is the image from a RAW file:

The image is much cleaner and less harsh.  You don’t have those white blowouts and you can even see his face.  And remember, I didn’t touch anything but brightness.  You have this same control for all the other aspects of your photos.

Yes, there are downsides. The RAW file size is much larger so your camera card will hold less pictures.  You also need to bring each image into Photoshop, or the software that came with your camera, to make the choices before it get saved into something you can use.  But, most cameras allow you to take both RAW and JPEG at the same time, so you only use the RAW if you need to.  So, with that, RAW may not be something you use all the time.  If you are out with friends and are just shooting to upload to Facebook, then this is overkill.  But if you are on vacation, or taking pictures of you new nephew, or some other important event, then this may be the route you want to take.  If you shoot RAW and jpeg at the same time, you have bets of both worlds.  Someday, you may want to make a nice print or an album of those pictures and you will be glad that you had the RAW file.

In a future post, I will show how the RAW software works.  It is pretty easy.  So don’t feel intimidated.

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