Camera RAW format

I have an Olympus C-8080 in an Ikeliet housing with 2xDS-125 strobes. Can someone explain how/why I would use the RAW setting for capture, and how I process that image into something that i can share like a jpg?

Steve

Hi Steve

I use Nikons rather than Olympus and I am not familiar with your camera. However RAW is the nearest digital thing to a "negative". Whilst JPEGs have some form of data compression, RAW does not and, unless your camera or software has a RAW viewer, it is not, I think a "viewable" format.

The advantage of RAW is its lack of compression - and that programs such as Nikon Capture and Photoshop CS can make changes to some of the picture data produced by the camera settings - without altering the RAW file. So White Balance, EV settings and a number of others can be manipulated very easily.

I have always shoot RAW files and then if I want to email them - or maybe use them for screensavers, copy them to JPGs.

The only disadvantage of RAW is the file size. My RAW files (from a Nikon D100) are over 9MB each. So big storage cards are a must.

Hope this helps.

Hi Steve,

Just read your post. I have an Olympus C5050Z and as an experiment during my recent trip to Eygpt I switched to RAW mode to take my pic's. I currently only have a 256Mb xD card so was limited to only about 30 shots (but was enough, always have my laptop available to download).

When I came home I copied over the RAW pics to my main PC and fired up Photoshop CS2.

To be honest I thought the quality of shots were alot better in RAW mode (being the highest resolution). Photoshop provided all the info concerning the pic and historgram etc. I still need to experiment more on the various setting you can use in Photoshop to improve the quality of the pic, but that's another story.

You can still save a copy as a JPEG (or other format) file when your finished and display using your favorite program (I use ACDSee)

Not sure if this is of any help to you...but try it out.

I'm off to buy a 1/2gbyte CF card now.

Chris

This is a long-standing discussion. Many professionals, underwater and terrestrial, avoid RAW because of the time and effort it takes to process images on the computer. In principle, a perfectly exposed jpeg at max. resolution/minimum compression will be just as good, and a lot easier to handle...

...but perfect exposure is a bit difficult underwater. This, I think, is why RAW is so popular, if you have the time to process the images afterwards. The RAW converter programme is then crucial, and different photographers like different programmes, so advice is often unhelpful: try several, if you can!

On an hour's dive I can fill a 1Gb card, easily, with 160 RAW images from a Nikon D70. This is the smallest card that I'll use: the 512 Mb cards that I started with, shooting jpegs, aren't big enough.

After a dive I bin the poor images, after viewing on a TV to get a better impression, and back up to a portable hard drive before recycling the card. If I don't have my laptop handy, then I keep the "star" images on the card, in protected mode: I seem to take more memory with me every time that I go away (much to the dismay of my family, who are travelling to Bonaire with me next week, and who have to find nooks and crannies in their luggage for my bits and pieces).

My workflow on coming home is to save the RAW files to DVD, convert the worthwhile images to Photoshop or tiff and save them to DVD, then process the images, save as another batch of uncompressed files, and lastly to save the final images as minimally compressed jpegs for use.

It's not that strange to note that the best images need the least processing, and so the better the photographer that you are, the less the need to work in RAW (if you are bold). If you want to play with your images, or want maximum flexibility, then RAW is for you.

B)

It's not just that RAW's aren't compressed (in fact, the 'new' Nikon NEF *IS* compressed, albeit losslessly). RAW also preserves the (well) raw sensor data so that processing like demosaicing (each pixel is R or G or B (or similar) and these have to be interpolated to all pixels), white balance, contrast, sharpening, and saturation have NOT been applied as they would be in a JPG. This gives you MUCH more latitude to correct screwups in your original captured image. For those of us who only get a handful of "keepers" a day, the additional workflow is well worth the flexibility.