Why Shoot Raw?

Short answer - because the quality of the resulting image is noticeably better than what the camera can produce with its limited preset values for sharpening, saturation, contrast, color temperature and noise reduction.

Longer answer. In order to produce a standard jpg image, the camera's sensor receives the image, then electronically applies adjustments according to the settings you have made in the camera. These are image manipulations that, while they produce pleasing images, remove data from the file. For ultimate image quality you don't want to remove data as a first step. Ever.

A raw file contains all the information captured by the sensor, with no adjustments. The camera's firmware allows for 2-3 levels of coarse adjustment in each category, while computer-based software, known as raw conversion software, generally has infinitely variable adjustments. In addition, raw conversion software typically provides all sorts of adjustments that are not possible in-camera. Exposure correction, hue saturation and luminance, highlight and shadow recovery, brightness, exposure, color temperature and tint, and local contrast. Some of the more powerful converters also enable to correct for lens deficiencies such as distortion, vignetting, perspective, chromatic aberrations and color fringing.

Here is an example of an image that has been just converted and not processed, essentially showing what the camera saw. Notice the curve of the lower step, graininess and lack of overall image "snap."

Taken 12/19/11 with Fuji Finepix F600EXR, ISO 400, 1/17 sec, F3.5 4.4mm (equivalent to 23.7mm), uncropped (click on images to see larger versions)

And this is what resulted from a quick pass through Adobe Raw Converter and Photoshop:

In Adobe Camera Raw I applied a Fuji-specific lens profile to handle the distortion and light drop-off in the corners. Next I used the sliders to adjust highlight recovery, reduce exposure raise black levels a bit, and added some vibrance. I then opened the image in Photoshop CS5, applied fairly aggressive noise reduction using Topaz DeNoise, did a local contrast adjustment using unsharp mask (55 pixels, 45%) followed by a sharpening 1.5 pixels and 60%. to come up with the second image. The most striking features are the straightening out of the steps, the highlight recovery revealing the words in the lights set into the step risers, and an overall "punchier" image as a result of the unsharp mask local contrast adjustment.

So where do you start? First you'll need a camera that is capable of shooting raw. Websites such as http://www.dpreview.com/ and http://www.steves-digicams.com/ have fairly up-to-date reviews and listings of digital cameras and include file format specs.

Raw conversion software comes in a wide varietly of flavors. The simplest are those which are bundled with the camera such as SilkyPix, Canon Digital Photo Professional, and software that should be bundled but is not from Nikon - Capture NX. These are usually pretty clunky and slow to use, but are free with the exception of Capture NX, so they make a good starting place.

The next category of Raw capable software are a bit more mainstream in nature - Adobe Camera Raw, Bibble Pro, Raw Shooter, etc. These are generally very powerful for single image editing, and in the case of Adobe's Camera Raw, somewhat integrated with an image editing program - in this case, Photoshop. Other packages include fully integrated image editors such as Picture Window Pro and DXO Optics Pro.

Finally there are the industry workhorses, also known as workflow software - Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One - which provide excellent raw conversion some image editing capability, and asset management capabilities. The primary value of these is the ease with which one can apply image adjustments to multiple images, making it possible to edit huge numbers of files in short order.

Here is a little trick in the event you already have a camera that does not shoot raw, or forgot to set the camera to raw format. Photoshop has a command in the file menu - Open As - that allows you to specify the file format you would like to open the file as. In the drop down list you can find "camera raw" which allows you to open a jpg file as a raw file in Adobe Camera Raw. This opens the file in the ACR editor, with nearly all the adjustments available to raw files. I once shot an entire set of outdoor images in jpg with the white balance set to tungsten. Under normal circumstances this would have resulted in a lost set of images. Since the lighting was consistent for all images in the set, I opened them all as raw, applied a white balance adjustment to one image, highlighted the entire set and used ACR's synchronize feature to apply the adjustment to all the highlighted images. Such is the power raw. The workflow packages offer similar capability.

I hope this helps to demystify the process of raw image processing for you. In 2007 I purchased my first raw-capable camera, a Nikon D200, and started shooting raw almost immediately. The only times I shoot jpg is either by accident or if I am a second shooter on an event where the primary does not shoot raw. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.