RAW Photos

For three years now I've heard people talk about raw images and how anyone who is serious about photography wouldn't shoot jpg.  Well, some of that may becompletely subjective as many great photographers actually do only shoot in jpg - in that case you just have to be really good.  Raw 'photos' aren't even images, but instead are data that you capture instead of the image.  Then it's your job to take that data and turn it into an image. Point-and-shoot cameras do it for you by giving you the jpgs.  After a year of being unable to figure out how to actually edit the raw data, I started shooting all images in raw and jpg (so that I'd have the jpgs as a back-up) when I went to Skoki a couple of weeks ago.  After just one day of playing around with raw vs. jpg, I've been converted.  Below are a couple of sets of images: the top image is straight as they came out of the camera in jpg format. Both of those would have likely ended up in the trash as one can't rescue much out of such dark jpgs.  The comparisons below are images created from the raw data, and which are definitely keepers for me.  I could have extracted them with even more ligh, but chose not to in order to emphasize the starburst effect of the light and candles.  Each image has about 30 seconds worth of editing, including some final cropping for better composition.

Fireplace: original jpg

Fireplace: extracted from raw

Candlelit table: original jpg

Candlelit table: extracted from raw