In the Raw

Nine years ago when I purchased my first SLR I was anxious to learn about the technique and composition that makes great photos. One common advice was to shoot as much film as you could, taking notes with each shot, and learn from experience by comparing notes with the prints that would sometimes take days to process.

The adage "film is cheap" appeared everywhere from photography magazines to course books. The problem for me was, as we were entering the digital age, film wasn't really cheap. Before they did digital transfers, you would easily pay $4 for a roll of decent 24 exposure film and an additional $8 at the drug store for development and 4x5 prints. That made each shot 50 cents a pop. When they started offering the photographs to be scanned on CD it rose to about 70 cents per picture.

The final insults came when I had a running streak of about a dozen developed rolls with CDs from various places - Wolf Photo / Ritz Photo, Walgreens, Walmart and Target - all come back with either scratches on the negatives, poorly developed film or hair and dust on the digital transfers. Surprisingly, the Walmart one-hour photo was the best of all the developers. Nevertheless most of the developers' environments were dirty and they often didn't bother to change their chemicals like they were supposed to.

There was a considerable amount of buzz about how photo development establishments were going under because of the digital age. In reality, they were cutting so many corners that their quality went down. Instead of meeting the lowered demand by raising their quality or lowering their prices they rose their prices and kept the same low quality. Although switching to digital was expensive at first, it has more than paid for itself in the lack of development costs alone. For those who are interested, the breakpoint was at around picture #2143.

Because of the high costs, slack treatment of the negatives and poor customer service received from one establishment after another, switching to digital photography wasn't as much about convenience as it was about empowerment.

If celluloid film was "cheap", digital film is downright dirt cheap. Shooting 6 MP RAW with low res JPEG only eats up 7 megabytes per picture. That's over 140 pictures per Gigabyte card. A very fast 1-GB Compact Flash card today runs around $45 on Amazon. That's the same as just 3 rolls of film with developing and digital transfer, but it holds as much as nearly 6 (24 exposure) rolls on one card. The card literally pays for itself half-way through being filled with RAW images.

RAW has many advantages over JPEG. It's often likened to a digital negative. It is usually proprietary to the camera maker (E.G. Nikon, Cannon, etc) but RAW format readers such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Apple iPhoto or the free Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials can handle just about any RAW format you throw at it. Because a RAW file contains so much more data than its JPEG counterpart it can give the photographer more leniency when the settings aren't just perfect and can provide some other surprising advantages. For example you can change settings in "Nikon Capture 4" then tag certain settings you like and build on top of it with differently tagged settings. When you find certain settings that you like you can then export the RAW image into a more common JPEG format for distribution. You can also swap back and forth between tagged settings. Doing this neither removes nor changes the data in the file that was actually captured from the digital sensor. JPEGs, on the other hand, are said to degrade in quality each time they are re-saved.

The only problem I see with RAW is that because of its size, it slows down the camera by filling up the buffer more quickly; it can reduce your frames-per-second rate. It can also be slow to transfer to the computer. However, the advantages outweigh that inconvenience. When haven't we accidentally left some goofy white-balance setting on the camera and taken some great shots only to find out later what happened? JPEG files would leave you spending hours in Photoshop trying to correct the color cast damage. RAW images can remove the white balance with a 2-second flip of a switch.

There's also a gradual move into High Dynamic Range (HDR) monitors. When they become more accessible, who wouldn't want to see their photographs in richer detail than before? In this case, the data being saved in RAW is more advanced than the displays and possibly more detailed than most high quality prints.

For those who aren't quite as good at the technical aspects of photography as they are with the artistic composition, RAW could save their day. Programs such as Photoshop CS2 allow you to remove the white balance setting without losing any data. JPEGs lock the bad light temperature cast in the pixel data where it simply can't be removed. RAW can arguably even help with bad exposure since it has a much higher dynamic range that can be pulled from the file; the higher dynamic range of RAW even allows you to create the popular multi-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) images seen throughout flickr.


Finally, looking into the technology of the near future, those who have locked themselves in the lower dynamic range of JPEGs may regret not going RAW as others who have are able to tout how much more amazing their [RAW] photo taken two years ago looks on the new HDR technology.

The nature of photography is similar to that of the medical profession - it's a practice... it's always a practice. Those who say "real pros" don't need RAW since "real pros" get the shot right to begin with don't know what they're talking about. I've asked numerous paid photographers to discover that they sit on either side of the RAW/JPEG fence just as much as we amateur hobbyists photographers do.

Additional Links:
More about using the RAW format.
Excellent Unbiased Reviews about digital cameras and equipment.
Flickr photo sharing community. Who could ask for more?
Learn to take great photos.
Free Pixmantec RawShooter | essentials 2006 (Windows Only).
Read more about HDR.
Tutorial to pulling HDR effects off of a single RAW image and off of multiple images in Photomax.
Various tutorials on building HDR images in Photoshop CS2.