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Most cameras can shoot Jpegs, tiffs and raw files,
when you press the shutter button your camera records a raw file
which it actually then sends off to it's processor to be changed into a Jpeg or
Tiff.
Now Jpegs are very convenient, they're small
so you can get lot's on your card, the downside with a jpeg is they're
lossy they begin to fall apart, take this image here for example.
now suppose I decide to put that into the computer
and then do some work on it so to darken the sky down a bit perhaps
now that looks a bit better, i'm gonna save it just in case i go and mess it up the
next bit of work i do.
The trouble is each time I save a Jpeg
it loses some data it starts to disintegrate after about 5 or 10 saves.
Had I shot it as a Tiff file, it would be nice and stable.
Tiff's are big so they take up a lot of space but you can save them until you're
blue in the face.
Raw files on the other hand are something completely different.
So let's go and get a piece of cake.
I can buy a Victoria sponge like this from almost any corner shop
anywhere in the country
and it'll be fine but it'll be kinda lacking character and individuality,
because it's been cooked in a factory it'll be just the same as any other cake
cooked in that factory.
this is kinda what happens when your camera
cooks a raw file into a image file. It's been prepared according to a set
of pre-programmed guidelines
bit like cooking instructions but what would happen if I could get at the
original raw ingredients of that image?
I could mix them up my own way,
and bake my own sponge and start to put my own interpretation upon it,
but I'm probably just gonna make a mess.
Here's own that was prepared earlier,
and straight away
you can see that this is something a bit special I can certainly smell that it is
and hopefully I'm gonna taste that it is in a moment or two as well.
A raw file takes the ingredients necessary for you to bake your
own image in the computer which by the way is a considerably more powerful
cooker than the processor in your camera.
On there own raw files are not a great deal of use for anything,
you gotta cook them into something usable like a Tiff or a Jpeg
before you can print and enjoy it I know you can make image files a bit brighter
more colorful or contrasty but in the same way that I can't add a couple more
eggs and a spoonful of sugar to this sponge
that's about all you can do with it without messing it up.
you could never take a Jpeg like this and rebake it into this
without going back to the initial raw ingredients there's simply not enough
information left in the file
and it'll begin to fall apart now I'm not suggesting that you should always
shoot RAW files anymore than you should always bake
your own cakes there's issues of time inconvenience to be thought about to
but if you do take the trouble the results
usually well worth it.