The workshop I attended in Mendocino last weekend was based on Camera Raw. You might have heard this term bandied about...What exactly does it mean? Basically, it refers to an image that is taken using every part of a camera's sensor and not altered or edited in any way by the camera or its programming. You might have thought you're already doing that when you take a picture, but no, not when you're taking the usual JPEG photos.(You'll know you've taken a JPEG when you load your images onto your computer and each photo will have a file number followed by the following tag: ".jpg")
JPEGS (pronounced Jay'-pegs) are the product of an editing program approved by a group of professional photographers and photo editors. What JPEGs do is edit an image down to a manageable file size so that it doesn't take up too much room on your memory card or computer. The editing is, simply put, automatic, based on a set of rules that reduce detail by grouping similarly-colored pixels together. For example, if you have a little area in your photo with two yellows that are very close in color, JPEG will go ahead and combine those into just one color yellow, thereby halving the amount of information coding needed in that area. Most of the time, this automatic editing is not especially noticeable, although there is one major drawback: Each time you save a JPEG on your computer, you apply the automatic editing program once again, and so that means that with each save, you lose information. That means that over multiple saves, edges within the image soften, the focus is not quite as crisp, and details are modified or even lost.
Some photographers don't like that loss of information. If anything is going to be cut out or modified in their photos, they want to do it themselves, and be in control. That's where Camera Raw comes in. Camera Raw photos are exactly everything the camera saw when you pointed the lens and pushed the shutter button. The majority of family cameras are not equipped to shoot Camera Raw; only the fancier models do. (If you're in doubt, check out your user's handbook). Camera Raw photos have no editing, no compression, and no alterations beyond the aperture opening, shutter speed, and related settings that the photographer set the camera at.
Now, if you're following what I've been saying, your next observation will be: "Well, with no editing and no compression, that means that the file size of each photo will be a lot larger than usual, right?" and you'll be absolutely correct: Camera Raw files are humongous. Fortunately, gigundo memory cards are coming down in price, as is the cost of additional memory for your hard drive, or even for external hard drives. And to serious photographers, it's worth it.
This weekend was the first time I shot in Camera Raw, and to give you an idea of how much space Camera Raw takes up, I shot 262 photos and I still hadn't filled a 4Gig memory card. So the Raw photos aren't impossibly big.
But let me tell you some other things I learned about Camera Raw:
1. Camera Raw photos can NEVER be changed. Sure, you can delete them, but you can't alter their content. Well then, how do you edit them, you ask? Well, you need a professional-level photo editing program, such as Photoshop CS3, or Lightroom 2.
Here's how it works: You import a Camera Raw photo into one of those Photoshop programs, and as you edit it, the program can be set up to save your editorial changes to what's called a "sidecar file," a little file with an ".xmp" tag that gets hooked onto the Raw file and travels around with it (on your sayso). When you open the Raw file, its sidecar .xmp file kicks in and applies your editorial changes, which you then see on your computer screen. Better yet, these programs also give you the option to either save your edited image as a JPEG or a TIFF (uncompressed) file, both of which can be easily read by your and other people's computers. But even with your new, edited JPEG, you'll still have that unchanged Raw photo stored on your computer. Or better yet, you can set up an external hard drive and store all your Raw images on that, like a museum archive.
2. This whole idea of storing unchanged Raw photos in an archive can be really appealing, except that there's one catch: The particular Camera Raw format you use is tied into the particular model of camera you're using, and five or ten years from now, especially if your camera model is discontinued, new versions of photo editing software may no longer recognize your camera's Raw images and you won't be able to open or edit them using the new software.
How do you get around this? One way is to set up your camera to take a Raw image and a JPEG image simultaneously. No extra clicks of the shutter; it's all done automatically--more professional cameras can be set to it easily, just look under your "Quality" topic on your camera's menu. You can edit either image, but save a master copy of your JPEG untouched as your long-term archive photo, because those will always be accessible.
Or, here's another idea: You can import your Raw images into Lightroom with the special instruction that copies them and converts them to digital negatives, or DNG format. The DNG format is very similar to Raw, except that it is considered "open source," which means that any program will be able to open it, now or later in the future. Once in the DNG format, your images can easily be edited and saved.
3. One last thing that I learned the hard way: Microsoft Windows won't be able to "see" your photos. In other words, they won't open up as photos in Windows Media Player or any of its other photo organizers. That's because your computer just sees your Raw images as batches of data; there's nothing to translate them into color pictures for you. So don't get crazy (like I did) when you can't see your Raw photos on your computer--You'll have to import them into a program like Photoshop CS3, Adobe Bridge CS3, or Lightroom 2, and then you'll be able to see and work with them.
That's the scoop on Camera Raw. Next, my take on Bridge and Lightroom.
Comments