{"id":188,"date":"2005-11-13T22:07:04","date_gmt":"2005-11-13T14:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/?page_id=188"},"modified":"2006-01-28T21:09:33","modified_gmt":"2006-01-28T13:09:33","slug":"07-strike-a-raw-deal","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.elcreations.org\/engloy\/photoblog\/ten-tips-to-better-digital-photography\/07-strike-a-raw-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"#7 Strike A RAW Deal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Strike A RAW Deal<\/strong><\/p>\n

So you’ve plonked down your hard-earned cash and gotten yourself a decent four to five-megapixel digital camera. The camera comes only with a crummy 16 Megabyte memory card (or at best a 32 Megabyte one). Unfortunately, many digital camera manufacturers give only the bare minimum when it comes to memory cards for their cameras. After all, why jack up the price of your camera and reduce sales by adding a high capacity card at all? You realize that you can probably only fit seven to eight pictures onto the card if you shoot at the highest resolution settings. So what do you do? Shoot at a lower resolution setting? Unfortunately, many go away then with the impression that by using lower resolution settings they will save on memory space. Yes, you will save on memory space, but I will tell you, “No way!”, if you are intending to take the best quality pictures! To me, that is like getting a top-of-the-line Ferrari sports car, and driving it without changing beyond the first gear!<\/p>\n

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Even when I had a 4-megapixel G3, the need for larger capacity card storage became pretty obvious. I added on first a 64Mb card and eventually getting larger-capacity storage: from a 128Mb card, to two 256Mb cards, and finally to a 512Mb card and a 20Gb X-drive II!
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The fact is, you will never realize when you might want to make enlargements of an unexpectedly spectacular shot you might have got. Although most pictures taken at lower resolution settings are acceptable for display on the computer monitor, they end up looking horrible if you send them to the lab for development since the printing process usually requires a much larger-sized file to begin with.<\/p>\n

My first digital camera was a 2.1-megapixel one which I bought a few years back for my graduation ceremony at the university. Unfortunately, I was forced to scrimp on memory space and had to use low resolution settings. The end-result: pictures that are good enough to admire on the screen, but not anywhere else! Thankfully, I had some pictures taken with a film camera then!<\/p>\n

Personally, I take my digital photos only at the highest resolution settings. If your camera supports RAW or TIFF capture, use that! Such images are typically huge (my camera uses 6-7 megabytes per RAW image stored, and a 256Mb memory card can only take less than 40 shots). They require some processing on the PC after they are taken before they can be viewed easily. But the results far outweigh the advantage of being able to take more pictures with the same memory card. These images are typically sharper, and because they contain the data as it is directly taken from the camera sensor without any in-camera processing, you can easily tweak the settings for the best effect even after you have completed taking the shot. JPEG images taken on most cameras are typically smaller (because some data has been filtered away by compression) and although they can still be adjusted readily in any photo-editing program, the amount of leeway and the ease with which to do so is typically much more restricted opposed to RAW.<\/p>\n

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A shot that was originally taken in RAW and processed to bring out the details in the shadows without burning out the large amount of whites towards the bottom left of the shot. Compare the amount of noise between the processed RAW file and a JPEG of the same scene processed similarly. It is pretty obvious that the RAW file had less visible artifacts when post-processed compared to the JPEG file!
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The trade-off with RAW is of course the increased storage requirements. With the large-capacity memory cards becoming more affordable, this has become less of a problem. For me, I carry a digital photo wallet when I go on overseas trips. This is essentially a portable hard-disk device with 20Gb of storage space and is sufficient usually to last me for a week of shooting.<\/p>\n

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Another example of the power of RAW processing: the top-most image was the original unprocessed image that would have been obtained had the picture been captured in JPEG mode. The larger version is the resulting image that was obtained after processing the RAW file. Note the details recovered in the shadows as well as the superior colour richness with minimal resultant noise and artifacts .
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Previous tip: <\/span>Adopt Different Perspectives<\/span><\/a>
Next Tip: Keep To The Dark Side<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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