Read Why you should always shoot RAW and never shoot JPEG to understand the theory.
It’s Quality
You can equate a Raw picture file to a digital negative. The camera’s done no processing to the file tself you might not agree with (and might want to undo!).
It’s pure, and it’s the best quality picture file your camera can give you.
It’s Fast
If I do a shoot – be it a villa or a Black 5 – I shoot a lot of frames. I’ll try different angles, different exposures, different apertures to give different depths of field. In short, a lot of files.
So I want a rapid way of processing what is often hundreds of frames.
I like an easy life, so I use three Adobe products that are designed to work with each other to make picture post-processing fast and simple.
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge is a software product that’s a very efficient lightbox.
It can display a few frames or a lot of frames. It can have a preview window. It can sort pictures into a number of orders or classifications.
When you do that first look at the pictures you’ve shot, Adobe Bridge makes it easy to pick the keepers that warrant more attention.
To move to the next step in the process, just double click the Raw file you want to work on.
Adobe Camera Raw
Adobe Camera Raw is a part of Photoshop. It opens pretty much any type of Raw file from all the major camera manufacturers.
‘Experts’ argue there’s better Raw converters out there. Maybe. But frankly the differences are so subtle I’d rather have the easy and efficient workflow offered by the Adobe Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop combination.
In Adobe Camera Raw there are a few simple sliders on the right of the picture that adjust colour temperature and colour hue, exposure overall and selectively. For example, highlights can be reigned in a bit, and shadows can be lightened easily.
If you’ve got a batch of pictures from the same lighting conditions, you can even save the settings you’re using to apply them consistently to an entire batch of pictures.
It’s quite amazing just how forgiving Adobe Camera Raw is. I’ve been able to recover pictures with significant over or under exposure or fairly awful colour casts and get perfectly usable pictures.
Adobe Photoshop
With the major corrections out of the way, the third and final step is to open the picture in Adobe Photoshop to do the subtle stuff.
I use Photoshop to straighten and crop pictures and to clone or patch things away that shouldn’t be there.
If it’s a professional job I’m doing, that’s probably the end of it. Picture completed and ready to be sized for whatever use it’s going to be put to.
If it’s for fun, all the basic stuff is done fast to get me a nice picture to start playing with.
How Fast?
When I shoot a job, depending on what it is, I’ll probably shoot around 500 frames in total.
At the Adobe Bridge stage I’ll reduce those to somewhere between 50 and 100 pictures I actually work on. And I’ll probably take that down to 40 to 60 pictures the client sees.
I can complete that in half a working day, including the resizing and uploading to the web if that’s part of the brief.
For me, that’s fast. And the quality of the results is as good as the camera is capable of delivering.
Any Downsides?
Not really. You need to be aware each Raw picture file is bigger than an equivalent large JPEG file. Probably at least twice as big.
So immediately that means you get fewer pictures on your cards. But these days cards are so cheap, I’m not sure that’s an issue. And of course you buy the cards once and use them over and over again.
In the medium term, long-term storage of a lot of Raw files can be an issue. But disk sizes are getting bigger and bigger and disk prices continue to fall. So again, is it really an issue?
Conclusion
For me, Raw is the only way to shoot.
Check out my previous article on the theory of why Raw picture files are better than JPEG picture files.
Then add the practical dimensions described above of being able to create quality pictures rapidly, and it’s a no-brainer.
