RAW Files

This afternoon we had a short lecture on RAW files. This gave us more of an insight into why it’s much better to work in RAW rather than the usual JPEG. I found this extremely intersting as I found out just what I could do to my photos when it came to editing in RAW. During this lecture I found out that RAW files are better for editing as theres more processing options, they’re higher quality that JPEGs which I’m used to using, they have 68 billion colours and they’re 16 bit files. When you upload RAW files from your sd card onto your computer, they will either be NEF files (when working on Nikon cameras) or CR2 files (when working on Canon cameras). When it comes to processing there’s a huge amount more you can do to process than when working on jpegs. When working with RAW files you need to make sure you have the RAW camera plug in on your computer otherwise you’re limited. On this plug in, there’s a lot of tools which are very handy and fun to work with. This includes tools such as clarity (which is to pull out extremely minor details), graduated filter (which is to create a graduate exposure throughout the image) and spot removal tool which gets rid of unwanted distractions. When saving RAW files, to make sure it keeps all of it layered quality, you need to save it as a TIFF file. This is because unlike when saving jpegs, it keeps all of the details for the photo whereas jpegs are compressed and lose a lot of detail.