Why shoot raw?

The award winning image

One of the ribbon winning images that I entered into this year's competition on Jekyll Island was taken several years ago with a point and shoot camera. As I prepared the image for printing, I wished that I had captured the image as raw. Here's why.

Serious photographers have already figured this out, so if you're serious, stop reading this and go take some pictures. One or two of you might just be coming up to speed, so this is addressed to you.

Most cameras produce JPEG compressed images, which have been processed, white balance adjusted, color balanced and sharpened to provide what should be the average pleasing result, and they do a pretty darn good job. Some cameras, notably SLRs and some point-and-shoots can deliver raw images as well.

Inside the camera, the data is collected from the sensor, and that data from the sensor is what we call raw. The key element in a more expensive camera is often the quality of the sensor. Good sensors deliver more data per pixel in a raw image than can be stored in a JPEG compressed image. Yet the best sensors cannot compete with the visual capabilities of the human eye.

The original JPEG image

So the first, hopefully obvious point is that the raw image is not processed and balanced to some average. You get to do that yourself on the computer when you load the image into Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto or Aperture, or perhaps some software that came with your camera.

Well, if you're like me, when you start doing this you ask, "OK, now what? I've got all these controls, and I have no idea in which direction to go!" Yep, it can be overwhelming, and the names on all those sliders don't necessarily mean much to the uninitiated.

But control s the whole point. Because when the processor in the camera does the work for you, you have lost most of the ability to control. And very often, it is the nuance in the image that can make the difference. In fact, many times we want to exaggerate the nuance. For some people, exaggerating the nuance is a key element of their photographic style.

So by using raw images, you are able to make fine adjustments of the image, getting away from the "good average" spin that the camera processor would put on the image.

Finally, because there is more data in the raw image than a JPEG compressed image, it is possible to reveal parts of the image that the processor in the camera ignores. One example of this is the number of bits in the digital data. We generally think that 8 bits each of red, blue and green is sufficient to produce an image. They eye can discriminate at least 9 and perhaps more bits in adjacent patches, and our vision system can sense perhaps 16 bits in a scene.

So if you're deciding whether to shoot raw or not, first decide whether the JPEG images that you get are sufficient for your needs. In most cases they are. But if you find something lacking, then capturing more data and sorting through it may well be a worthwhile effort.

What was it in that prize winning image that I discovered that made me wish it was raw? It was the detail in the dark, shadowy parts of the image, especially in the rafters in the roof. By using raw processing in Lightroom on this JPEG image, I was able to reveal some of that detail that was otherwise invisible. That detail balanced the composition, and the judges thought so, too. But the depth of control, and the amount of detail was necessarily limited by what I had available in the JPEG image. If I had a raw image to work with, this might have been a second place image instead of a third place image.