Raw Photos

My friend "Sophie" has been using the Raw setting to capture her images for over a year (maybe more?) and I've been looking forward to it immensely. After playing with the basics I already knew about my SLR for a couple months, I finally picked up the manual to find out what else I could do. A LOT!

So I clicked over to Raw + JPG to do a comparison with a couple shots and was frankly dissapointed. What could I do in Raw that I couldn't do with a JPG in Photoshop? Didn't appear to be anything but the same tools with different names.

I knew there had to be more to it.

This weekend I took a few shots while I was upright and feeling as though I was well (when in fact I was thwarting my healing efforts by being anything but horizontal), and decided to do a real comparison.

Here's the original shot. The white balance was set to cloudy or shadows, as I recall, giving it that yellowish mystical aura. I like it.

So then I set to editing it. Separately, the JPG on Elements (left) and the RAW on the camera's editing program that's the only one I can view and edit raw images on (right).

It's difficult to exactly match anything on different programs. But they both turned out nicely. No big difference as far as I can see. I did sharpening & noise reduction on both, played with the curves, a little contrast...

I blew it up further to see the finer details at 300%. Again JPG left, RAW right.
















There I saw the difference. The RAW (right) when sharpened capture more detail in the face. So much so, though, that it became pixelated and noise-y. No bueno. But I really like the depth it gave to my son's face.

So, take the RAW edited image, and despeckle it in Photoshop Elements, and I keep the depth and the noise reduction from the RAW processing smooths out the skin beautifully I can now see, while photoshop's despeckle got rid of the sharpened pixels. If you compare this with the Elements only above on the left you can see how Elements was not able to get rid of the noise in the skin like the RAW adjustments.

And we have a winner.

So while RAW photography wasn't everything I'd hoped it would be, it is not quite the worthless vehicle I originally thought. In theory everything I was able to edit with the RAW software I should be able to make adjustments for on the camera in the field. But until I become a pro at setting the perfect settings, I can fall back on the RAW editing program.