Friday, February 18, 2011

Photog Friday: RAW and being cool

Let me begin by saying that my workflow process is not perfection. I am still adjusting and finding new ways to be more efficient for me and for my clients, but the bit of advice I am giving today will always stay the same...

Are you ready for it?...

Go. RAW. Now.


I first started shooting in RAW because another photographer told me to do so. He gave me a list of reasons why it would be beneficial to me, none of which made any sense at the time, but it sounded technical enough so I listened to him. I didn’t even know the benefits of shooting in RAW, but I knew I was cool doing it. Yep! Shooting RAW makes you cool too.

I digress.  Well, sort of...this still sort of has to do with being cool. Say you are at a photo shoot and you have Auto White Balance set because you are jumping all over the place and don't have the time to adjust the White Balance each time. You get home, load your pictures, and notice that a number of your pictures have a very serious "cool" tone to them (meaning blue color casts). If you shoot in RAW, you load the picture in your RAW conversion program, hit the WB that gives you the correct temperature. Then WALAH! You have saved your photo and been awarded major cool points for saving multiple pictures.


Is your picture a bit underexposed? If you shoot in RAW you can adjust your exposure post processing with no loss to the data you have captured on your camera sensor and without compressing the file and losing details. Of course, your ultimate goal is to try to get the correct exposure every time, but using the RAW program to adjust two to three stops will not hurt the picture.

The thing about shooting in RAW is that it gives you the opportunity to get the best possible picture post processing out of each shot.

Disadvantages to shooting RAW: it uses more space on your media card and because the image is not compressed, the colors come across less vivid and more flat than they would in JPG.

Take a look at my before and after. This picture was a bit underexposed and a little too "cool" for my liking.


and this is how I corrected it in RAW.



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