Twisted Indifference

As promised earlier this post will be about the advantages of Processing in RAW.

First just to make sure everyone is on the same page, a little information about what a RAW Image File is all about. To put it simply, this is what effectively replaces the film negative. While the negative has to be printed to be of actual use, the RAW file goes through substantial post-processing before it can be converted to a RGB file format. So what is the difference between shooting in RAW and shooting in JPEG when they have to be put through post-processing anyway? Read on…

The RAW file is not a processed file. The JPEG undergoes in camera processing. For example, when you set the White Balance and Exposure while shooting JPEGs, you are more or less committed to that shot. While Photoshop does offer a wide variety of tools to fix errors, they are relatively limited and the editing here is destructive.

RAW processing involves non destructive editing. A RAW file literally holds all possible data for a given shot. If the in camera white balance was set to Daylight, a RAW file will also store the result of that shot had the white balance been set to Auto, Fluorescent, cloudy or Shade etc. It also stores data across 5 tonal ranges. While discussing tonal range is worth a couple of more posts, suffice to say for now that if you have shot in RAW, a significant error in exposure (under/over) is easily correctable.

In the photo above, the vividness of the colours, the slightly unnatural effect of the sky and the evident wash of light resembling a strobe on the grass is all thanks to processing in RAW. I am not going into details as to what were the tweaks that I carried out, this post is already a couple of days overdue, I do not want to set it back by a week. That and the fact that I recently did a midnight shoot with the full moon as my source of light. I want to finish editing those images, incidentally they were shot again in RAW.

Goes without saying that the upcoming posts will be on night photography. Save for one interruption of course. I will be in Bombay on Monday, Ferrari is planning on unleashing the F430 on the Bombay streets and me and my camera would not miss it for the world. The Enzo is also slated to make an appearance though I am not aware if it will hit the streets too. Have a great weekend, if you are planning on coming for the Ferrari event, do let me know.