Raw Concerns


When compared side by side, it's easy to see that shooting raw offers a number of important advantages over shooting JPEG: editable white balance, 16-bit color support, no compression artifacts. But as you've probably already suspected, there is a price to pay for this additional power.

Storage

First, raw files are big. Whereas a fine-quality JPEG file from an 8-megapixel camera might weigh in at 3 MB, the same image shot in raw will devour 8 MB of storage space. Fortunately, this is not as grievous an issue as it used to be, thanks to falling memory prices. With gigabyte storage cards currently selling for under $100, you can amass a good amount of storage space for a very reasonable investment.

Workflow

One of the great advantages of digital photography is that it makes shooting lots of pictures very inexpensive. Thus, you can much more freely experiment, bracket your shots, and shoot photos of things that you normally might not want to risk a frame of film on. Consequently, it's very easy to quickly start drowning in images, all of which have unhelpful names like DSC78457.JPG.

Managing image glut is pretty easy with JPEG files. You can simply open the images and look at them, or you can drop them into a cataloging program to view thumbnails.

With raw files, things are a bit more complicated because a raw file doesn't contain any comprehensible image data until it has been processedit's a little more difficult to quickly glance through a collection of raw images.

Fortunately, with raw gaining in popularity, a number of cataloging applications now allow you to view thumbnails of your raw files (Figure 2.12). Some raw converter applications also include this functionality. Creating the thumbnails can take a little while, so the workflow still isn't as speedy as with JPEGs, but the quality advantages are well worth this small inconvenience.

Figure 2.12. Managing your raw files is much easier if you use an image cataloger that supports raw, such as iView MediaPro.


Shooting performance

Because raw files are so big, the camera takes more time and memory to buffer and store them. Depending on the quality of your camera, choosing to shoot in raw mode may compromise your ability to shoot bursts of images at a fast frame rate. In addition, your camera may take longer to recover from a burst of shooting as its buffer will fill up quickly and take more time to flush.

If you want speedy burst shooting and the ability to shoot raw, then you may have to consider upgrading to a camera with better burst performance.




Getting Started with Camera Raw(c) How to make better pictures using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements
Getting Started with Camera Raw: How to make better pictures using Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0321592131
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 76
Authors: Ben Long

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