raw

[Antoine_Fabi]

Hi,

I'm new to digital photography.
What are the benefits of shooting "raw" ?

thanks

[Drew599]

Its good if you want to mess with the image in post without screwing it up from compression and stuff like that. Just test it out and see if you like it or not.

[Antoine_Fabi]

thanks

[scharky]

Personally I won't shoot anything on anything other than raw, here are a few benefits. . .
1. Higher dinamic range, less compression allows you to exploit the full power of the CCD's bringing back information that would have been clipped shoot tiff or jpeg.
2. Better color reproduction, truer color reproduction, 12bit vs 8 bit, plus the ability to open in photoshop as a 16bit document allow for more precise and better color correction
3. Photoshop CS2, it is now faster to work with RAW files than jpegs, for small color corrections, cropping, and batch processing photos, YOU DON'T EVER EVEN HAVE TO OPEN THE IMAGE, YOU CAN DO ALL THIS STUFF FROM THE ADOBE BRIDGE.
4. You choose how you comrpess the image, therefore you don't have to rely on the compression scheme that Canon or Nikon give you.
5. Set your white balance to "A" and go, with RAW it does not affect your file one bit to change the white balance after you shot.
6. Much smaller file size than shooting in "Tiff" format, if you have that opiton on your camera.


Downsides, for quick, results, jpegs always look better right out of the camera. RAW files will look flat and unsaturated, so if you have clients that need to be impressed right away, do what I do, shoot RAW+jpeg, so you have the raw file, but the camera also converts a jpeg file for quick viewing.

RAW also takes up 2 to 3 times as much space as a full quality jpeg.

[Asa]

I HATED shooting digital until I started using RAW. Now the pictures that I'm getting are much more comparable to film. And Stefan, you're right, Photoshop CS2 is great...

Asa

[Graeme_Nattress]

Yes, RAW is the way to go. You can choose white balance in post, which is very useful. Lack of compression is lovely, and you can "develop" the RAW in CS2 so well, so nice, with such complete control. The files are also quite small, comparitively, and retain full quality.

Graeme

[Rich Lee]

i love playing with white balance in post...and the exposure latitude is great. you can really pull details out that would be lost in a jpeg.