essential skills: digital photography in available light
Introduction
One of the big topics of conversation since the release of Photoshop CS and Elements 3 has been
the subject of ‘RAW’ fi les and ‘Digital Negatives’. This chapter guides you through the advantages
of choosing the RAW format and the steps you need to take to process a RAW fi le from your
camera in order to optimize it for fi nal editing in Adobe Elements or Photoshop CS/CS2.All digital cameras capture in RAW but only Digital SLRs and the medium to high end ‘Prosumer’
cameras offer the user the option of saving the images in this RAW format. Selecting the RAW
format in the camera instead of JPEG or TIFF stops the camera from processing the color data
collected from the sensor. Digital cameras typically process the data collected by the sensor by
applying the white balance, sharpening and contrast settings set by the user in the camera’s
menus. The camera then compresses the bit depth of the color data from 12 to 8 bits per channel
before saving the fi le as a JPEG or TIFF fi le. Selecting the RAW format prevents this image
processing taking place. The RAW data is what the sensor ‘saw’ before the camera processed the
image, and many photographers have started to refer to this fi le as the ‘Digital Negative’.The sceptical amongst us would now start to juggle with the concept of paying for a ‘state-of-
the-art’ camera to collect and process the data from the image sensor, only to stop the high-tech
image processor from completing its ‘raison d’être’. If you have to process the data some time to
create a digital image why not do it in the camera? The idea of delaying certain decisions until they
can be handled in the image-editing software is appealing to many photographers, but the real
reason for choosing to shoot in camera RAW is QUALITY.