Camera Raw

The pho­tos I’ve posted in the last cou­ple of days were shot with a Nikon D70 in raw mode. When a dig­i­tal cam­era cre­ates a raw file, it makes a file that is unedited data straight from the sen­sor chip. (Tech­ni­cally, a few things are done with the file, but it’s basi­cally just sen­sor data.) The advan­tage of a raw file is that it is not processed by soft­ware in the cam­era to “opti­mize” it. A raw file is designed to allow the pho­tog­ra­pher to process it on a com­puter using soft­ware such as Pho­to­shop. Before such edit­ing, a raw file looks a lot worse than a stan­dard JPEG file that any cam­era can pro­duce, because it hasn’t gone through soft­ware opti­miza­tion. But a raw file can be more exten­sively edited than a JPEG. In gen­eral, only midrange and pro­fes­sional class cam­eras can cre­ate raw files. Low-end con­sumer dig­i­tal cam­eras gen­er­ate only JPEG files.

It’s a very good idea, by the way, to con­vert the raw files your cam­era cre­ates into a dif­fer­ent format—DNG files. DNG is an open for­mat cre­ated by Adobe that has sev­eral tech­ni­cal advan­tages over pro­pri­etary raw cam­era for­mats. Because it’s an open for­mat pro­mul­gated by a major com­pany, DNG files will be read­able by photo manip­u­la­tion soft­ware 20 or 30 years from now. By com­par­i­son, any given pro­pri­etary raw for­mat from a spe­cific cam­era man­u­fac­turer may become obso­lete in a few years (it’s already hap­pened to some early raw for­mats). You can get the free Adobe DNG Con­verter at Adobe’s web site.

Lately I’ve been learn­ing about Cam­era Raw, which is the pro­gram that comes with Adobe Pho­to­shop for work­ing with raw files. The newest ver­sion of Pho­to­shop, CS3, comes with Cam­era Raw ver­sion 4. This ver­sion has impres­sive photo edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties all by itself. In fact, it is pos­si­ble to do all of your photo opti­miza­tion in Cam­era Raw, using Pho­to­shop only for cer­tain kinds of tasks. The pho­tos I’ve posted in the last cou­ple of days are edited only in Cam­era Raw—they haven’t been touched by Pho­to­shop or any other image editor.

I really like Cam­era Raw’s para­met­ric image edit­ing con­trols. Par­tic­u­larly excel­lent fea­tures include:

• The abil­ity to recover data from clipped white pix­els. When the bright­ness of a pixel is maxed out in one or two of the three color chanels, Cam­era Raw can recover usable data from what remains.
• The abil­ity to eas­ily copy para­me­ters from one photo to oth­ers. If a group of pho­tos is shot under sim­i­lar con­di­tions, it’s much faster to edit one photo, copy those edits to other pho­tos, and then tweak them, than it is to edit each photo one at a time in Photoshop.
• All edits done in Cam­era Raw are non-destructive. That means that none of the orig­i­nal pixel data are mod­i­fied. You can always go back to the begin­ning. In Pho­to­shop, you need to work with com­plex lay­ers to avoid non-destructive edits. In Cam­era Raw, all changes are recoverable.
• Cam­era Raw ver­sion 4 can now edit JPEG files. You can’t do as much with them as you can with a raw file, but that’s still a use­ful feature.

Of course, you can’t do every­thing in Cam­era Raw. If a file needs mask­ing or pixel-level edit­ing, you need an image edi­tor. But I’ve been amazed at what you can do with what I used to think was just a con­ver­sion pro­gram. I know this sounds like an adver­tise­ment, but it’s really a great pro­gram (and I’m not nearly impor­tant enough for Adobe to pay me to say that).