Raw files Image

Nothing to disagree with Woo, I used the "I" word, meaning myself. I do sometimes judge incorrectly and make a hash of shots (hey, I'm human) which would require too much time to edit and correct.

I would rather spend the time out and about shooting than sat in front of my monitor editing them, it's just a personal thing.

Steve...

 

This first photo of the entrance of Tsavo game park was taken in RAW format then converted to JPEG for viewing purposes.
You will notice that I have focused on the sign and the camera exposed the shot in AV mode at F9 250 sec. Using evaluating metering it did what I wanted. You will see also though that the sky is greatly over-exposed and devoid of cloud detail. This creates a problem because if I exposed the sky correctly, the subject (the sign) would have been greatly under-exposed.
This is when taking the photo in RAW format comes into it's own because I can easily correct this by editing in PS. This is not manipulating a photo rather than correcting exposure levels. You do this by Layering.


You create a duplicate layer then then simply lower the brightness levels then hey presto you will see the clouds and the ground correctly exposed.
You simply carefully use the erasure tool on the top layer to show the bottom layer.



Point being this couldn't be achieved half effectively if you took the original photo in JPEG.

 

I shoot exclusively in raw because after more than half a century of taking pictures - I still get exposure right on way less than half of the pictures I take. With raw I can easily recover all but the very gravest exposure errors.
The only disadvantage I see to raw is the larger file size and therefore the more storage space that is required. However if - like me - you are not into shooting everything in sight and then having to wade through thousands of images, storage space issues shouldn't arise either.

 

I'm sure that I've read somewhere that every time you save a jpeg file you progressively lose more and more detail, but a RAW file will be an exact copy every time.

Is that correct?

 

Yes that is true.
Jpeg is lossy compression which discards a certain amount of info every time it is re-saved. Along with the actual editing itself, repeatedly editing and resaving the same image can eventually render it a shadow its former self. Which is why you should aways have some form of an original master copy. In this regard Raw is ideal and comparing it to being the equivalent of a film negative is very accurate analagy.
Consider also that one's digital skills get better as time goes on and possibly one might want to 're-develop' that exhibition picture that we had taken ten years earlier. I came in at Photoshop 3 and the big innovation was Layers. Now you can hardly consider any kind of graphic editing without using Layers.

 

I said this recently on a topic on here and advised someone to shoot in a mode that allowed to save both jpeg and RAW at the same time because of this. As skills improve so will the shots, even now I'm gong back a few years and through old RAW files to edit again, I also firmly believe that ones eyes improve with a view to editing.

As far as storage goes its so cheap now for huge drives, that it should not really be a problem.

Yes it is, when you open a RAW file to edit then save, you do not save it as a RAW file again but must choose another file format, such as Tiff or jpeg, or depending on what image software your using, you can also save it in that programs working file format. For example with photoshop, it is .psd

If you use Phooshop to edit your RAW files what will be saved next to your RAW file is an XMP sidecar file, this contains all the settings you chose when you editing the RAW in Photoshops RAW converter, and allows you to go back to exactly where you where last time you edited the RAW file. Then in the RAW converter software you can then choose to open the file into photoshop for further editing if desired and save to jpeg or whatever, but the XMP file stays exactly the same as your last edit you made in the RAW converter software. You can choose to start with the settings in the xmp file the next time you edit the RAW file or to ignore that file and start with the RAW afresh, either way, the RAW file remains on your drive exactly as it was when you put it there.

Steve...