using Adobe Camera Raw, it was possible to almost completely recover
the sky, even with such extreme overexposure.
Usually you won’t have two or more stops of overexposure to
contend with, but you will immediately appreciate from these samples
how valuable shooting in raw format can be in tricky lighting condi-
tions, particularly high-contrast conditions. Don’t expect miracles,
though.
Another problem is that JPEG is a “lossy” format. This means that
each time you save a JPEG fi le, some data are discarded (lost), even
at the highest-quality settings (“best” or “12”).
WHITE BALANCE
Finally, and importantly, with raw you are not stuck with the color
balance guessed at by the camera when the shot was taken. As entire
image data are saved in the raw fi le, you can change the white balance
later on. With a JPEG format, the image white balance was chosen
FIGURE 5.2 An overexposed raw fi le con-
verted to JPEG.THE RAW DEAL 81