Shooting with RAW and not JPEG​

This is more a personal thing than anything but I personally like using RAW photos when shooting.  What this format means is that it has to processed thought a RAW for mater as these are more like Digital Negative File.  Which you can play around with and create some amazing looks to photos.  For me personally I normal use Photoshop and Adobe products.

There are alot of steps that you can do which can change the look of the photos.  I love to have a small play with this as you can change the look of the photo just by sliding one or two things.  I have made HDR images thought this processes but to me, they do not feel like true HDR images but as Adobe changes there camera RAW processor what you can do with your Raw file before it turns in to a bitmap which can then be turned in to any type of file from Tiff to JPEG.

As you can see with the image to right there is alot of things to look at and one of them is the first thing that comes up.  Which is to do with the look, of the final image.  There are also taps along the top where you can still change the feel of the image this way.  These are the main things to work with first.  This list is from top to bottom.

• Temperature: this is for colour balancing.
• Tint: this will help with colour balancing.
• Exposure: to sort out any under or overexposed photos to give it something extra.
• Contrast: this is here to help with the black balance and how much depth there is with the photos
• Highlights: this is so you can pull back the brighter side of things as this will give the photos a better balance and feel to them.
• Shadows: this is for pulling detail out of the shadow of the images
• Whites: this is so you can balance out how much white there is in the photo, this is to take out more or less white photos.
• Black:  this is to make black areas less black or more this is all down to what you went out of the photo.
• Clarity: this is one of my favourite things to use as this does shapen up the photo.
• Dehaze: this is something new that I am still getting used to using, that said I think I have worked out what is dose as it gives more sharpens and colour to the photo.
• Vibrance: this takes out some of the colour but not all which can be good.
• Saturation: this can take out all the colour or add tones in.

These can be all played with but it is down to how you are looking for in the photos.  There are a few things that need changing where one of them can change make or break your photos.  I have these set at default.  I am not going to go through what you can do with camera RAW at the moment but these are also things you can do in photoshop itself.  Just you can make the photo look amazing to how you would like to see them.

This is some that will take longer to do if you where using JPEGs as you can set all the images you are working on to sync up as then you would have to take actions to do the same thing on many photos but with using RAW you can send the data to all of them in one go.

This again is all personal and for me, it is a RAW choice as the JPEGs can be easily from the RAW and not the other way around.  I know I went through this bit of the Camera RAW.  I will be thinking about righting more about Camera RAW int he future but not for at least the next blog will be something different.

Joe