Take control of your photos with RAW

By JIM ROSSMAN

Tribune News Service (TNS) T his week a friend and photo enthusiast asked a question, “I know a person who knows more about photography than me, and he says I might want to look into shooting RAW photos. I asked him why and I didn’t really understand his answer. What are RAW photos, and should I be taking them?”

To understand RAW, you also need to understand JPEG. Both are types of _les captured and saved by better digital cameras and smartphones.

When a camera takes a picture, it is capturing the light reected off the scene through the lens. The light from the raw image is absorbed by the photo sensor and a corresponding data _le is created.

There is a ton of information captured, and you don’t need all of it to make a good image.

If your phone or camera is set to save the photos as JPEG images, the RAW image _le is processed and compressed and saved in the JPEG format.

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is an image format that’s compressed as it’s saved. You can set differing levels of compression to shrink the size of the data _les, which also decreases image quality, while hopefully still producing a nice photo.

When your camera is set to save photos as JPEG _les, the RAW data is not saved.

RAW photos contain the entirety of the data captured by the sensor, without processing. The _les are larger, and they aren’t even an actual picture _le. To see the image, you’ll need software that can read RAW image _les; Adobe Photoshop is a popular option. Adobe Lightroom is another more consumer-friendly option.

To use the RAW images, you’ll need to process them. I’m not saying it’s dif_cult, but it is a step that most people don’t really need to master.

If you’re old enough to remember shooting pictures on _lm, shooting in RAW is the modern equivalent of developing your own _lm and printing your own pictures. You can learn to do it, and you may love it, but you may learn enough to _gure out you’d rather not bother.

But if you are a photography geek, and want to get the most out of your images, by all means, shoot raw and get yourself a processing app and make some pictures.

It’s a cool hobby. Note, some cameras can shoot in a mode called RAW + JPEG, which actually saves the RAW photo along with the JPEG version. It’s the best of both worlds, but you’ll need a lot of storage to save all those _les.

There is plenty to read online about shooting and working with RAW images. If the topic interests you, Adobe’s website has a lot of good information.

Jim Rossman is a tech columnist for Tribune News Service. He may be reached at jrossmantechadviser@gmail.com.