The power of RAW

Hi dear Steemian friends,

I want to share with you some little secrets about photography. This time I’m going to be speaking about RAW photos.
For the ones who never heard about it, RAW image files are uncompressed “negative” format files that need to be elaborated by a software in order to be printed. It’s a similar version of the negative of the former photographic film.
It seems complicated but I’ll try to keep it simple. Usually at least 90% of the photos are taken in JPEG (or JPG), which is an elaborated format ready to be stored and printed and the size of the files are smaller.
The advantage of RAW is the amount of data available, that allows you to take out colours from either very darken or bright area of the photos.

This is one of my last shots in RAW edited in Lightroom and Photoshop
Nikon D750 at 28mm, f/9, 101sec., ISO 100

This is the RAW image without editing: pretty different isn't it?

The filenames extension of Raw files are different depending on the camera brand that you are using, for instance for Nikon users the file extension is NEF and for Canon users CR2

Here you’re going to see the same photo taken with the same camera at the same moment in RAW (NEF) and JPEG with my Nikon D750 1/320 sec. f/4 70 mm ISO100. They look almost the same and the differences are really slight.

RAW file

JPEG file

Now I’m going to try to take out details from the dark part of the photo with both format, and here are the results.

RAW

JPEG

As you can see the one on the bottom (JPEG) look s a little bit washed out and lacking in contrast, but if you magnify a little bit more….

RAW

JPEG

The differences are astonishing!!!!

Pros:
What does it translate to for a photographer? If it happens to find yourself in a situation where conditions are intriguing with strong lights and harsh shadows I strongly recommend you to shoot in RAW.
Another big advantage of this format is that you don’t need to find the right white balance when shooting, because it can be fixed in post production: a typical challenging situation that everyone has experienced is night photography when lights are dim and therefore the WB guess can be difficult.

Cons?
The only cons of RAW are the size of the files and the fact that you have to elaborate the photo with a software afterward.

Before finishing I want to give you another example of a RAW file before and after editing

Before editing.....and.....

after editing in Lightroom

Hope you enjoyed the post and if you like Photography stay tuned because other tutorial are coming

All the photos are my own, please upvote and leave a comment.

See ya