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RAW format photos versus JPEG photos

An introduction to the benefits of RAW workflow

If you've been merrily snapping away your JPEG format photos for a while now then you may even have progressed to a little post production rework, using a package such as Adobe Photoshop. Again you may have progressed to being happy to burn, dodge, fade, lighten, tweak and all of those other wonderful features that these packages offer but did you know that by not shooting in RAW format you're missing out on so much more in the production of your images. To explain we need to go way back...

The dark ages (Well dark rooms and noxious chemicals!)

Back before digital (BD!) photographers either developed their film and photographs in their own dark rooms or sent them off to professional labs with teams of specialists. Either way people involved in photographic production locked themselves away for hours in red lit rooms with a clock, a set of chemicals and enough water to fill a large swimming pool (Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration there!) Ion this bygone era space for dark rooms and access to the time and equipment limited many individuals to hand over their films to high street developers where they would mysteriously disappear for a few days before coming back in a nice little envelope. No preview of the photographs and absolutely no control over their processing and developing at all.

Those lucky enough to be hands on, with access to dark rooms, would lose hours in them but what they did have was a very high level of input and control over the final image. It took years to perfect the art and many photographers had entire teams of people to do this for them and offer that perfect image. So if digital photography has set us free of all this then how come many digital photographers are limiting their creative photography to their settings on the day or worse still the cameras interpretation of what should be set.

The JPEG photograph format

We are all familiar with JPEG as an image format and now the digital age has brought photography to the masses we have actually never had so much artistic control over our images. Indeed the instant JPEG format image has helped move the technology and the results forward. But JPEG format is by its very nature all about compromise. What the digital sensor sees is not always truly reflected in the JPEG and back to our Photoshop example, every time you rework and resave you potentially lose more information as, basically, a JPEG image blurs each pixel relative to its neighbours to reduce image size. The finer the blur, the greater the image size but every JPEG image created, reworked or saved is a compromise on the original image none the less.

Enter RAW images and XMP files

Not wishing to stay nostalgic for too long, our dark room example reflects a greater degree of artistic control over our final photographs by making variations in the processes along the way. This is basically what a RAW format image does. It gives you back the control over every aspect of your image in a non destructive way. A badly exposed image can be recovered, low light or mixed light images can be fine tuned, colour temperature modified and every time you save a RAW file you save a variation on the original (An XMP file), so the original is therefore always left intact. As an added bonus, a set of images can have the same process tweaks and modifications applied, which is especially useful if you have a set of photographs shot in the same light/lens/camera conditions and want to apply your post production tweaks to all.

The downside: The CODEC issue

When a new technology emerges there are inevitably times when different manufacturers promote different formats. Product history is littered with the cast off remains of product manufacturers who marketed the same device with a different format. Digital cameras are no different. Each camera has different sensors and different sensors have different RAW formats. While JPEG is a defined standard for digital images, the RAW format has historically been generated by each camera manufacturer for each sensor. Therefore each manufacturer needs a different CODEC, which is the software plug-in that translates the RAW file image into a format that can be understood by your post production software. Don't give up yet though because there is a solution.

Adobe DNG standard versus CS2, NEF formats

Now we all know how quickly software goes out of date, stops being supported and the upgrade cycle continues. It is no different for cameras, post production software or operating systems. As cmeras age and operating systems change the CODEC's are not longer supported. It soon became obvious that like JPEG a universal, generic standard was required. Now that's something Adobe are very good at and that's who came up with the Digital Negative or DNG standard, which is well on the way to becoming the standard format for RAW images.

In the meantime the RAW images produced by your Canon (CR2 format RAW) and Nikon (NEF format RAW) can be converted into DNG format, which means you should then be able safely future proof your images whatever the future brings.

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