RAW questions?

im really new to photography...im stepping up from point and shoot to DSLR.

whats RAW? whats the point of it, whats it do? what do you do with it? i saw a thread called Show Us Your RAW Conversions, BEFORE And AFTER. and the after shots are awesome......so is raw just an ugly photo that you can re work?

Here is where the adventure starts:
http://www.ronbigelow.​com/articles/raw/raw.h​tm

Here's some of the stuff gathered by POTN members:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=80337

It's your digital negative.

bryman31 wrote in post #11589891
im really new to photography...im stepping up from point and shoot to DSLR.

whats RAW? whats the point of it, whats it do? what do you do with it? i saw a thread called Show Us Your RAW Conversions, BEFORE And AFTER. and the after shots are awesome......so is raw just an ugly photo that you can re work?

And, I should say, if you spend some time in that thread you should see that it is totally not just an ugly photo that you can re work! Go through a few pages and see what people accomplish in their Raw processing that would either be very difficult or impossible to do otherwise...

Gatorboy wrote in post #11590652
It's your digital negative.

I think a better metaphor is that it is your digital undeveloped film.

tzalman wrote in post #11590673
I think a better metaphor is that it is your digital undeveloped film.

Yup, I think that this is an understanding we have reached that is very cool -- a negative has been developed and has a "set" bunch of tones and such, but a Raw file is wide open to being developed and redeveloped.

I don't know if this way of thinking originated in POTN or not but it is definitely liberating!

tzalman wrote in post #11590673
I think a better metaphor is that it is your digital undeveloped film.

I like it! Makes more sense.

Tony - This is an article that I discovered recently that I think you would enjoy reading, sort of a blog of one man's odyssey from film to RAW

http://wwwimages.adobe​.com …dfs/pscs3_rende​rprint.pdf

Heh! Wowser! Add to my favorites to read more of! Amazing how much can be packed into the digital darkroom!

hey thanks guys, reading the info now......by ugly i didnt mean ugly it was just my first thought of word.....im on page 40+ in the thread showing before and after, and im AMAZED by the differences, some of the pics people are saying they barely even filtered too. BUT seeing that thread has also made me realize i need some sort of software like lightroom too LOL.....there has to be othere but thatll be another thread.


so RAW is a digital negative, is the size difference a result of being cropped at the end after all the adjustments to the photo?

bryman31 wrote in post #11592229
hey thanks guys, reading the info now......by ugly i didnt mean ugly it was just my first thought of word.....im on page 40+ in the thread showing before and after, and im AMAZED by the differences, some of the pics people are saying they barely even filtered too. BUT seeing that thread has also made me realize i need some sort of software like lightroom too LOL.....there has to be othere but thatll be another thread.

If you use a Canon DSLR you are provided with the Canon Raw processing software Digital Photo Professional (DPP). Even though it's "free", it's actually very good at giving a very nice image. Apps like Lightroom, Aperture, and of course Camera Raw in Photoshop have some very powerful capabilities, but DPP will take you a long ways.

You can crop in a Raw processor, although one of the powerful things about Raw processors is that the original is always preserved, so that you can produce different versions at any time. In this sense I like to refer to a Raw file as "undeveloped film" in that it hasn't even become a negative yet until you actually process it.

But you also see images on the Web that get resized into a "final product" -- the Raw data gets processed then output as an image file that for much "common" use needs to be sized for normal viewing on a computer screen. This is part of what Raw processors can do -- again, the original Raw file is preserved but you can "spit out" a file for, say, viewing on the Web at any time.

If you are new to DSLR shoot jpegs until you get the hang of it and taking good photos.
Later on if you find you are wanting more from your photos....then check out Raw.
You can take great pictures in JPEG.
Unless the highlights are blown out there is little visible difference in the two when using a program like Lightroom for processing which enables you to get the most out of your Jpegs.

cool thanks tony........so if im shooting in RAW should i use the largest image size setting? with my older canon point and shoot i always used the superfine mode with the highest resolution setting.

bryman31 wrote in post #11593975
cool thanks tony........so if im shooting in RAW should i use the largest image size setting? with my older canon point and shoot i always used the superfine mode with the highest resolution setting.

Whether to use one of the "xRaw" smaller shooting sizes is up to you, although I've heard that some processors don't handle them so well. I personally lean toward shooting in the full-size Raw so that I always have the option of a large print or a close crop.

Using sRaw or mRaw is not like using a lower-quality jpeg setting, it's more like using a lower-size jpeg setting while keeping the higher quality setting. So it's a question of whether you need the full image size. There are times when you are shooting something that would not benefit from the larger size at all.