RAW files - really - what the gosh darn flip?!

Myky D

Myky D

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Hi all,

I've got a Canon 450D and it's ace. I've read about RAW files, and for the first time I can take them. All I can really garner about RAW is that it's the most info you'll have in a digital file - better even than .tiff.

Points:

I like processing pix in PShop, though at the moment PShop won't recognise RAW (I've only got CS2, and haven't loaded up the Canon software, as am short on memory).

A friend the other day informed me that if I want to submit work to magazines and the like, they'll ask for the RAW.

I notice that RAW is absolutely blummin flippin heyuage. At the mo I only have a 1gb card (yes yes I know but justifying spending £20 on a piece of plastic smaller than my thumb is pretty hard when confronted with Ms D), so they kill it quicker than ... very quickly.

My questions are these:

1. Why would I want RAW?

2. What does RAW mean in terms of processing - I mean - really?

3. Will loading up the Canon software enable PShop to read the RAW files, and if so, will doing so allow me to do stuff I can't already with layers and channels in .tiff files?

4. Is it true about magazines and stuff wanting the RAWs?

5. Is RAW the best format for taking pictures of lions and tigers and bears?

Cheers for any help you can give me.

Myky D
 
Raw is the best format to take your pictures in - the files contain far more data than jpeg ones, allowing you to extract, or recover far more detail.

If I'm right in assuming that the 450D uses SD cards then £2.99 will buy you a 2gb card -delivered ;)
 
Raw as its name suggests is the basic information straight out of the camera and allows certain things to be changed LATER without loosing too much quality. Things such as white balance for example but also if your picture's exposure is wrong you can correct a larger fault if you have all the information that the RAW file possesses. There are no disadvantages other than storage space and maybe it taking a few moments longer to upload etc in shooting using RAW which is why most people on here will do that as a matter of course.
 
Flash in the pan - many thanks for the link - v. useful!

Cowaski - but - I can do all that with a jpg? What are these bits of info that I can't access?
 
You can't truly correct exposure in JPG, nor can you alter stuff like white balance etc, at least not easily.

Cawasaki mantioned the biggy with RAW: You can make all these changes without affecting the image quality.
 
Myky D said:
Flash in the pan - many thanks for the link - v. useful!

Cowaski - but - I can do all that with a jpg? What are these bits of info that I can't access?
Click to expand...


If you think of a RAW file as a negative, a jpeg, by comparison is like a Polaroid picture. The negative contains all the data your camera recorded whereas the jpeg/polaroid has discarded a lot of the colour information to produce a small image file.
 
Being really pendantic, its raw not RAW. Its not an anacromyn.

Its not a format either - each manufacturer produces very different output - Nikon NEF is basically just the raw data in extended TIFF.

Not that relevant really but hey :)
 
Flash In The Pan said:
If you think of a RAW file as a negative, a jpeg, by comparison is like a Polaroid picture. The negative contains all the data your camera recorded whereas the jpeg/polaroid has discarded a lot of the colour information to produce a small image file.
Click to expand...

Ahhhhhhhh!

That's the answer I was looking for!

NOW I see. That's a good comparision - thanks Flash In The Pan.

I shall now resolve to take RAW whenever I can!
 
The way I always look at it is, in film terms, RAW is developing in your own darkroom, jpeg is sending it to Boots.

On another point, I don't think magazines will ask for the RAW file as that is the undeveloped negative. It's highly possible they may ask for a tiff file but many will happily accept a jpeg, usually just requiring a suitable file size.
 
fabs said:
The way I always look at it is, in film terms, RAW is developing in your own darkroom, jpeg is sending it to Boots.

On another point, I don't think magazines will ask for the RAW file as that is the undeveloped negative. It's highly possible they may ask for a tiff file but many will happily accept a jpeg, usually just requiring a suitable file size.
Click to expand...

:agree:

In fact, as an owner of a printing business, I can assure you that no printer would EVER want to have a RAW file supplied, and if you did send them one they'd send it back to you saying "wtf is that" :eek:

Printers will gladly and happily accept TIFF and (preferably) JPG as long as they are 300ppi and converted to CMYK.

HTH :)
 
Set your WB to cloudy, go inside in the evening with some artifical lights and take shot in raw+jpeg mode. Then correct the WB of the raw....and you'll probably not bother correcting the jpeg because you will have already been converted. It is as simple as that.
 
As far as I'm aware.. if you want to use photoshop to process your raw files from a 450D, you'll need camera raw 4.5 and if I'm right, you need at least photoshop CS3 to be able to use it.. But don't quote me on that, I might be wrong but I'm around 99% sure that's the case, unless adobe have made another update for CS2..

Otherwise you can use the software that comes with the camera.
 
Another raw question relating to the magazine wanting raw question - Would they only want raw so they can start PP from scratch, as when you PP I guess you can't save it still as a raw, or can you?
 
It saves the adjustments made in a little file beside it, unless they wanted this file too?
 
GeForce Junky said:
Another raw question relating to the magazine wanting raw question - Would they only want raw so they can start PP from scratch, as when you PP I guess you can't save it still as a raw, or can you?
Click to expand...

As said, magazines won't want raw files. I really wouldn't want someone else processing my raw files anyway.
 
puddleduck said:
Being really pendantic, its raw not RAW. Its not an anacromyn.

Its not a format either - each manufacturer produces very different output - Nikon NEF is basically just the raw data in extended TIFF.

Not that relevant really but hey :)
Click to expand...

He's right, y'know ;)
 
Myky D said:
I like processing pix in PShop, though at the moment PShop won't recognise RAW (I've only got CS2, and haven't loaded up the Canon software, as am short on memory).
Click to expand...

RAW files can be opened, viewed and tweaked in Adobe Bridge, which I installed together with my CS2.
 
When i was working in design exhibitions when digital photography was in its infancy, a photographer once said to me "Think of RAW as an acronym, Read And Write, thats all the camera does, reads the image and writes the image, with no colour space, sharpening etc" That made alot of sense.
Dean:)
 
and honestly, once you've started using raw you'll never go back. The ability to correct mistakes, recover photo's etc without loss of quality is brilliant.


However - be prepared for the additional disk space required and bigger flash cards.
 
GeForce Junky said:
Another raw question relating to the magazine wanting raw question - Would they only want raw so they can start PP from scratch, as when you PP I guess you can't save it still as a raw, or can you?
Click to expand...

A magazine wouldn't entertain PPing your supplied image. They would expect the image you supply them to be "press ready". That means you will have already processed it how YOU want it; they expect to print what they are given.

The changes you make to the RAW file can be saved - they are actually stored alongside the RAW file as an XMP file. However, once the converted RAW has been opened in Photoshop and saved as a TIFF or JPG or whatever, you can't then save that file back to a RAW. (although there is a format called Photoshop Raw, but that's another story lol)
 
Flash In The Pan said:
Raw is the best format to take your pictures in - the files contain far more data than jpeg ones, allowing you to extract, or recover far more detail.

If I'm right in assuming that the 450D uses SD cards then £2.99 will buy you a 2gb card -delivered ;)
Click to expand...

It actually uses the SDHC card, but even so the same site sells them at £6.29.
 
andrewc said:
Does ACR for CS2 include the 450D or is that preserved for CS3 / CS4

Magazines don't want raw files. They just want easy to manage JPGs.
Click to expand...

As I said above...

"As far as I'm aware.. if you want to use photoshop to process your raw files from a 450D, you'll need camera raw 4.5 and if I'm right, you need at least photoshop CS3 to be able to use it.."

Unless adobe have made an update available for CS2, but I needed to update from CS2 to CS3 to be able to process my 450 raws as I was under the impression they were no longer updating the plugin for previous versions :shrug:
 
Just to confirm - ACR does not offer support for the 450D until version 4.4.1 which was only released for Photoshop CS3 and is not backward compatible with CS2
 
Myky D said:
I like processing pix in PShop, though at the moment PShop won't recognise RAW (I've only got CS2, and haven't loaded up the Canon software, as am short on memory).
Click to expand...
It's not a problem that affects me, but I'm pretty sure that a workaround is to convert the RAW files to DNG using Adobe's free conveter. Once you have the RAWs in DNG format, you can open them in anything from Elements to CS4.
 
SDHC is backwards compatible with SD.

Put it this way.... Your camera shoots in RAW. If you shoot in JPEG it converts the RAW to JPEG using fixed settings. If you shoot in RAW you can convert to your output format later using whichever settings you want.

RAW gives you the raw ingredients so you can keep doing it until you've got it right. JPEG gives you a final product which you can modify but at the cost of quality.

Say you've set the camera to sharpen too much, you can't unsharpen a JPEG in any way that would produce an image as good as starting with the unsharpened RAW and applying sharpening to the degree that you want.
 
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