Help with understanding RAW

Bufo Bill

Bufo Bill

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Bill
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I have reached the point in my hobby where I am thinking of beginning PP with something like PS elements, so I am looking into Raw files. I had heard (long ago and far away, so it's a bit hazy now) that raw presented your image without the little tweaks that any JPEG viewer has.
My worry is that I am going to shoot some pictures that are important to me that cannot be improved/saved with the features you get on Elements. Is this a case of the pre-step-up jitters, or am I looking at the wrong software package for my needs?
Many thanks from Bill. :D
 
If you are looking for the digital equivalent of a darkroom to enable optimisation of an image, including highlight & shadow recovery, dust spot removal, lens/perspective correction and optimisation for printing then the obvious package is Adobe Lightroom. PE is more for modifying images after they have been optimised by a program like Lightroom.

I have recently processed a bunch of images from our holiday: mine in RAW and my wife's from her Panasonic compact in jpeg using lightroom. With the jpeg images, if detail had been lost in highlights or shadows, it was gone forever. With the RAW files careful work would tease out a lot of details in both highlights and shadows in the same image, to end up with richer and generally more pleasing results.

Don't forget you can probably shoot and save your images in both RAW and jpeg formats at the same time, to give you a safety net.
 
Many camera manufacturers (Olympus and Pentax I've used) software can process the raw into jpeg at home using the camera settings identically as if you shot it in camera.
Having said that, lightroom was a revelation in how quickly and well you could process images with it...it might take a little time getting used to new tools, but you'll come to love the flexibility and extra headroom raw gives you.
 
Thanks for the replies. I'll look into Lightroom, thanks for the tip. I see that my camera does produce raw and JPEG images at the same time, so I'll give that a go too.
Many thanks from Bill. :D
 
Bill

If you are going to use Lightroom ( and it is an excellent program ) I'd watch a few video's before you start. It can be a bit daunting if you've never done any PP before. However saying that once you understand how Lightroom works, you'll find it an easy program to use. Also if you are initially going to shoot bot RAW and JPEG images, you can get Lightroom to display them both side by side.

Lightroom can be downloaded for a 30day trail at the Adobe web site.

RAW files have far more data than JPEGs this enables you to far more with them. It's especially in the highlight area that you will notice the difference.
 
Thanks for the advice Chappers. I take it I can see these videos on you tube? Are there any good books out as well?
Many thanks from Bill. :D
 
Lightroom will not corrupt your original image files, so they will be safe from editing slip-ups. LR leaves your originals in place and only creates a new image file when you have finished editing and choose to export it.
Furthermore, unlike Elements, LR does not degrade the image with successive edits, as it applies your edits only when you export the file.
 
Martin Evening has an excellent book and there are many tutorials on the Adobe web site by Julie Ann Kost.
 
Found the YouTube vids, they look very useful, thanks for that.
 
Thanks, will check out the book on Amazon.
All the best from Bill. :D
 
+1 for Martin Evening.

Nice thing about Martin is that he is ( was ) a jobbing photographer

Here's a link to some very good Lightroom video's

http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/lightroom-training-videos

You might want to check out the Getting started with Lightroom 4 tutorial, its a near the bottom. Ok it's not LR 5 but it's going to close enough to be helpfull.
 
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