Shoot in RAW
Posted on Dezember 20th, 2013
Were you ever disappointed by the result of a shoot with your camera? You know exactly, you saw by your eyes this beautiful colors of a sunset and then at home looking on your image and what is this? It looks so boring, no colors bad contrast and so on, although you are using a modern DSLR?
Maybe you should shoot RAW!
Watch at the image above, do you think I shoot this image because the sky was looking grey in grey? No, but after I watched the image, it looks like this. It’s the original shot without any changes. But good for me, I shoot in RAW, okay better I had shoot a bracket series in RAW but this was in the beginning of my DSLR career, now I knows it better.
But back to this image; it’s RAW and this means you can develope it, like in the early days of photography you had to develope the film.
And why should you do this? You need to know how digital images works, same like your monitor you are reading this article. Every image point, called pixel, is a tripple of the three main colors: red, green and blue. And each of it has 8 Bit for luminance. So you can build 256 shades of red, green or blue and in combination you got the immens count of more than 16 millions possible colors!
Hey that sounds great! But no, not really. Watch the sky, there are mainly blue colors and how many blue shades you’ve got? Only 256 and this is not enough to build up the high dynamic range of the real world!
But you are lucky, cause there is RAW! In a RAW-image you’ve got not 8-bit colors, you’ve got 14-bit colors. Hmm you think, that’s not alot more than 8-bit – uh you are wrong! 8-bit means 256 shades but 14-bit means 16384 shades, per color! And this gives you a total of 4’398’046’511’104 possible colors! Now you can say: WOW, THIS ARE A LOT OF COLORS!
Unfortunately, neither your monitor nor your printer can show this bunch of colors and shades. But with the help of modern software like Lightroom, you can trim the shades in the visible part and you can bring back all the structures and colors you have missed in your photos, IF you shoot in RAW!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I know this is a complex issue.
