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I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - Works nicely with Photoshop and allows you to view and tweak your photos in a “library” style interface rather than one at a time. This is the software I use to process my RAW files. Lightroom is fairly new and leaves much to be desired in my opinion, but I think it’s the best software at the moment for my needs. The $299 cost of the software will make some hobbiests look to other alternatives.
• Adobe Camera RAW - This is built into Photoshop. The last few versions of Photoshop have it. When you open a RAW file in Photoshop, Camera RAW opens and allows you to make changes to the file before it’s opened in Photoshop as a normal image. This is a great tool and gives you lots of control, but you can only work with one image at a time.
• ZoomBrowser - This comes packaged with Canon’s current crop of DSLRs, and may be a Canon only piece of software. It works like Lightroom in that you can process files in bulk, though you have limited control over tweaking the files. The price tag of free makes it attractive though if you’re a hobbiest.
• Google Picasa - This is cool, and this is the kind of stuff that makes me love Google. I discovered that Picasa reads RAW files on accident one day when it started cataloging all my RAW files. It’s free and I really like the interface. I think that the photo processing capabilities aren’t half bad as long as you’re not being too picky. The main release is Windows only, but a link on their site says they have a Linux version as well.

Processing The Files

The first step is importing the files into the software. This is usually very simple. Picasa does it automagically and Lightroom can do it that way too if configured for it.

Once the files are in the software, you’re ready to make adjustments. A few of the typical adjustments that you might make:

• Exposure - You can bring the exposure up or down several stops easily, freeing you from being 100% perfect during the shoot. Sure, if you blow out the highlights you can’t really fix that, but keeping your exposure in the mid-range means you can fine tune it easily in the software.
• White balance - Forget to change the white balance to the right setting while shooting? Not a problem, just change it now without any negative quality impact to your photo. The software is applying the white balance settings on the raw data, just like the camera would do if it were producing a JPEG.
• Brightness, contrast, fill light, shadows, highlights - These are all usually just a slider away.
• Saturation - Sometimes you want a image that’s more punchy or toned down. Maybe even black and white. This is an easy adjustment.
• Sharpening - Many of the RAW processing applications allow you to do some image sharpening with a simple slider. Good for us Canon guys who are used to a softer image straight out of the camera.

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Once you’re done making some adjustments, you’re ready to export the images into a format you’re more familiar with. For most this is JPEG, though TIFF files are another popular format. TIFF files are of higher quality than JPEG because they lack that compression that can kill JPEG files. But most labs want JPEG files for printing, and a full quality JPEG still gives you a great image. Exporting is usually a simple command in the software, just like importing.

Now that you have a file you’re used to, you can either call it a day or go on to make other changes. Photo retouching, multiple exposure blending, whatever your poison.

Once you become comfortable with the process of dealing with RAW files, you can get through a lot of pictures pretty quickly, especially when using one of the library style applications. When you get used to the control you get and realize that you can actually save some photos that you made a few boo boos on, you’ll like it even more.

Hopefully this primer is enough to get you going on RAW files. If not, you can always ask me a question right here in the comments or even start up a thread in the Sublime Light discussion forum where I or someone else can chime in.

I know this article is a smidge Canon-leaning thanks to me being a Canon guy. Apologies to you Nikon folks out there. Got some specific advice for other brands of cameras and their RAW files? Drop them in the comments and let us all reap the benefits of this wonder we call the webernet.