But while your system is designed to do a zillion different things, the camera’s processor is designed to do just one thing. How does the camera’s dinky processor compete with the massive brain inside your computer? It doesn’t. If Raw is so darned good, why doesn’t everybody use it? (Photos: William Porter) So why doesn’t everybody save Raw files?ĭespite its clear theoretical superiority, Raw capture is not universally embraced, even by advanced enthusiasts and pros. The downside: RPP is slow and has a difficult learning curve. Running the Raw file through RPP, I was able to recover detail that even Lightroom’s converter hadn’t found. A year after I took the photo, I discovered the amazing, Mac-only Raw Photo Processor. This is the best version I got from processing the Raw file myself in Adobe Lightroom 3. Fortunately, I was shooting Raw + JPEG at that moment. It’s a nominally decent exposure, preserving highlight detail at the expense of detail in the shadows. JPEG straight from the camera, a high-end compact (Panasonic DMC LX3). An in-camera JPEG is like a translated poem whose native-language original has been lost. In stark contrast, if you let the camera handle the Raw-to-JPEG conversion for you and discard the Raw data, you don’t get any do-overs. I’ve reprocessed Raw files that I captured years earlier and gotten much better photos from them than I could have originally, because Raw processing technology has improved.
If you have the Raw file, you can go back to it later and make a new and possibly better JPEG from it. You’ll be able to minimize your images’ noise and maximize their sharpness, with much greater finesse.Īnd by keeping the Raw originals, you’ll have more than one chance to perform the conversion. Working with a Raw file, you’ll have a greater chance of recovering highlights in overexposed clouds, rescuing detail from areas of shadow or darkness, and correcting white balance problems. Retaining more data means having more options during post-processing.
Raw files have what appears at the outset to be a decisive advantage: They preserve considerably more data than the JPEGs made from them. So, do you let the camera’s processor convert the raw data into a universally recognizable JPEG file? Or do you ask the camera to save the raw data-all of it-in a Raw file so you can process it on your computer? Do you want your photos “ready to eat” or are you willing to take ’em home and cook ’em yourself?
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