If you spend any amount of time around photographers you hear a lot of talk about RAW files and that may or may not sound confusing to you depending on your knowledge of photography. You may find yourself asking "What is RAW?" Most people know what JPEG is, it is the way that we share pictures online and via socoal media. Many of you might not know that the very pictures you share may have been once a RAW file that your photographer converted to a JPEG image.
What is RAW- RAW is a type file that contains data that has not been compressed, encrypted or processed in any manner.
What is JPEG- it is a CODEC which defines how and image is compressed into a stream of bites and then decompressed back into an image.
What does this all mean?
When I work with files in Photoshop I work with RAW files. I shoot in RAW format. What this does for me is it opens up more possibilities for me to manpulate the image how I want to. It takes in all the data that the camera and I see when I capture and image. It leaves the post processer (in this case me) a lot of options. I can recover shadows and highlights much easier then if I captured in JPEG.
Here is a good example: I shot this image when I first started my photography journey, and I admit I was not great then. I stumbled upon this image yesterday and thought I would try to recover it. Because I shot in RAW it made it a whole lot easier and what we have now is a beautiful image. If you shoot in JPEG I encourage you to chage it up on one shoot. Make sure that your computer and post processing programs can read RAW files. The possibilities are endless when your camera reads and records all the data for you.
This is the strait out of camera RAW file
And here is the final edit.
I hope this post helped you understand the differences between RAW and JPEG. Have a question about photography or an idea for a blog post? please e-mail me and I would be happy to anser it or write a post on it!
All the best!
Stephanie
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