Raw

joel222

joel222

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Lee
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I've taken my first shots in raw today and put them on my laptop but they look no different to others shot in jpeg. I thought that when you shoot in raw the pics appear similar to negatives from a film camera then you need to enhance them. Am I totally wrong about this?
 
RAW files are often referred to as "digital negatives", so I can understand where your confusion came from. When shooting you are capturing all of the information in the scene.
If you set your camera to shoot in raw, all of the information, with nothing "altered" will be transferred to your computer. This image file can then be worked on, or "processed" in photoshop, or Lightroom, or whatever programme is used.
Because the camera transfers all of the captured info to the PC, it is possible to do more with a raw file, for example, you can pull more info from an underexposed image in raw, so you can recover shadow detail, which would be lost in jpeg.
If shooting jpeg, the camera processes the image for you, and applies any settings you have set on your camera, vivid colour, size etc, and discards any extra information. It then compresses the image, which is why jpeg files are much smaller than a raw file.
This is a very basic description, and it is a bit more invilved than that, but it gives you an idea.
If you do a search, there are plenty of threads about shooting raw vs jpeg.
Hope this helps.
 
Whenever you open a raw image, the image processor you're using will always use a default setting to show the image. That's why you're seeing it looking very similar to a jpeg created by you camera. The digital negative is just the "raw" data of the image that is saved in the raw file.

As said above, it's the extra latitude of information saved by the file which allows you to work on an image in raw format without losing anymore information. You then can save the image out as another format (usually tiff or jpeg) once you've adjusted the image to your requirements.
 
If you have the option not to always shoot raw. That picture you take that doesn't look quit right is probably recoverable with RAW. Do a bit of reading online it's actually rather simple and well worth sticking with.
 
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