Tutorial	What is RAW?
Program	Photoshop CS2
Author	Annette Farrelly
Date	2nd July 2006

Various cameras can take pictures in different file formats, eg. jpg, tiff, and raw. This tutorial is designed to give you some basic information about the raw format, and what the benefits are of shooting your photos in raw format.

Basically, a raw file is made up of a lot of information, a lot more information than a jpg or tiff file, and therefore, when you take a photo in raw format and download it to your computer, you can’t just open it up and view it like you can a jpg file. You should be aware that if you don’t currently shoot in raw format, your overall process from when you take the photo to when you download it to your computer will be extended. This is because you will need to convert the raw files to jpg or tiff before you can view them, but the good news is, many software programs (such as Adobe Photoshop CS) provide a utility where you can do this in bulk.

So you might be asking if your overall process will be longer if you shoot in raw, why would you want to? Because it is in the conversion process where the benefits of raw come into play. Raw allows you to change the exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation, shadow and other settings of your photo before you convert the file to jpg, ie. before you actually ‘create’ the photo. Ok, but I can adjust these things through my software when it is in jpg format too? Sure you can, but not without losing data from your photo.

I’ll give you an example – here is a photo I took today of my son and my Dad at the park. Unfortunately my son decided to go down the slide where the sun was directly behind them, leaving me no choice but to take an underexposed photo (given the short time I had to take it!):

If I took this photo in jpg format, I could play with the settings and try and lighten the underexposed parts, but the sky would look completely overexposed, unless I was a more advanced Photoshop user I wouldn’t know how to avoid this, so this might be the result:

But because I took the photo in raw format, I could ‘play’ with it a bit before creating a jpg file:

So photographing in raw might effectively be able to save many photos that you might normally delete.

Personally, I take all my photos in raw, and then I do a batch conversion to jpg, resulting in all my photos always being kept in two formats (raw and jpg). Then, after looking through the photos, I might open a few of them in raw format, fiddle with the settings, and produce yet another jpg file, but only those that I feel need a bit of fixing.