L. M. Lloyd

A friend of mine recently got a new camera, and I am having a hard time really making clear the importance of shooting in RAW mode to him. So, I decided to put up a few photos to illustrate my point. In all of these photos, nothing has been changed but settings in the RAW translation to Photoshop. Of course, most of these look awful, but that is the point.

What you see here is the default settings as they came out of the camera.

This is the exact same image after white balancing to the neutral grey swatch on the calibration card. You will notice that the entire color cast of the file is completely different. The reason is because the camera just completely guessed the color of white incorrectly. If you are familiar with ColorChecker cards, you will probably also notice that colors are still very desaturated and flat as well.

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This is the same photo, after it has both been white balanced, and had a custom calibration profile applied specifically for this lens and body. Here the colors look quite a bit richer (though it can be hard to see in a browser). This is how the picture is supposed to look.

Of course the great thing is that even if you don't want the correct WB, the same tools can be used to get special effects. Here I have white balanced to one of the colored patches, to purposely cause a color cast to the whole image.

Of course, color balance is not the only value stored in the RAW file. Here I have boosted the exposure two stops, to give it a blown-out look,

Here I have taken the exposure down two stops. Of course both of these changes to the image make it look improperly exposed, but the point is that these same tools can be used to make an image that actually was improperly exposed, look like it was properly exposed when you took it, which can be an invaluable tool for saving a shot you though might be junk.

These are all very simple modifications of the RAW file, but you can see how very different they all look. However, despite how different they look, these are all the exact same file. There has not been a single destructive edit made to any of the images you see, just changes to the metadata in the RAW file. At any point, you could revert the file right back to the "As Shot" settings, and get back to square one without losing anything. What is important here is that these are not the product of Photoshop manipulation, they are the result of manipulating how the information was extracted from the RAW file. Yes, a lot of this could be done to a JPEG in Photoshop, but the difference is that rather than post-processing the 8-bit information of the image file in Photoshop, you are actually changing how your computer reads in the 12-bit (or 14-bit, or whatever your sensor captures) data dumped directly from your sensor. It opens up possibilities that quite frankly aren't possible with JPEG files.

With a JPEG, you could of course change your color balances, or any of these other transformations, but only within the bounds of the 8-bit information contained in the JPEG file. Whether you, or your camera ,are handling the translation from RAW sensor data to RGB colorspace, there will be information thrown away and lost. With JPEG though, that information is gone forever. When shooting RAW, all of it is still there, and you can go back and get it when you make your own conversion. It can make a huge difference to the final quality of the image, and I honestly think it is a huge mistake for anyone with a digital camera to ignore this capability.