Norman and I were discussing photography and the pro’s and con’s of shooting images in RAW mode. Most digital cameras output the images in JPEG format; this means that the camera processes the image in order to convert it to the JPEG format; this process often leads to a degradation of quality. When shooting in RAW mode, your chances of capturing the best quality image are greatly increased because no data manipulations occur within the camera. RAW files are not actually image files, but they contain the necessary data to create an image. No post processing is done within the camera to the RAW image, so there is no loss of quality. With the RAW image format the photographer can compensate for incorrect white balance settings and exposure settings. Because the camera has not done any post processing of the image, there is a lot more data to work with in programs like Photoshop, rendering higher quality final images.

Luminous Landscape has an excellent article, Understanding RAW Files. If you have a camera that captures RAW images or you’re thinking about purchasing a digital camera, I would recommend that you check out this article to see the benefits and drawbacks of shooting with RAW. Northern Images also has a good article on Why Use Your Camera’s RAW Format?

If you shoot with RAW, you must post-process your images and convert them to JPEG files for the web or to a format for printing; this can be a time consuming process. You’re going to find that most of the older image editing programs cannot open RAW files; this is because the program must have a RAW file converter built into the software. Adobe Photoshop CS2 includes RAW file format conversion tools that are wonderful; far better than version CS in my humble opinion. There are other programs that will convert RAW files including: BreezeBrowser Pro, Paint Shop Pro, and Photoshop Elements to name a few. While the RAW conversion process is time consuming, there are batch conversion tools in Photoshop CS2 that allow you to convert numerous RAW images that were taken under similar lighting conditions at one time.

Not all cameras will take RAW images. You can see a list of cameras with RAW capabilities that Photoshop CS2 supports at Adobe’s web site. rawconverter.com has a list of RAW Enabled cameras in addition to other RAW resources.

Adobe has several articles that you may be interested in reading: Understanding Digital RAW Capture, The Photoshop CS Digital Work flow

Photoshop Support has a video tutorial on Working with RAW files in CS2.
Russell Brown also has a variety of tutorials including RAW image manipulation tutorials at his site.

I wanted to give you this information to chew on for a bit. Tomorrow, I thought that we could take a look at Photoshop CS2 and the RAW conversion process in class.