What is RAW in regards to digital cameras? How does it work and what digital cameras have it?

Question by NationYell: What is RAW in regards to digital cameras? How does it work and what digital cameras have it?

What is RAW in regards to digital cameras? How does it work and what digital cameras have it?




Best answer:

Answer by Julie B
I'll see if I can explain this briefly...

When your digital camera takes a picture, it records WAY more colors in the image than you can see with the naked eye. What most cameras do is compress this huge image by getting rid of certain layers of the color. If you try messing around with the white balance, you can see different methods of compression at work - "indoor" white balance records the colors from spectrum a to b, while "cloudy" or "tungsten" or whatever records the colors from spectrum x to y, making the pictures look slightly different, even though they're taken in the same place at the same time. In other words, you're telling your camera to make the choice about what spectrum it's going to record automatically. A RAW file is the complete, uncompressed image. What you have to do with a RAW file is download it onto your computer and use a RAW converter to manually select how you want the image to be compressed (into a .jpg that can be used as a regular image file). The main difference is that when you shoot in .jpg, the camera makes the decision for you, so if you start tweaking with the color or contrast or whatever later, the image isn't as big and some of the quality can be compromised. When you shoot RAW, the camera records everything and YOU make the decision later about how to compress without sacrificing any quality or size. Unless you're a professional photographer or you need to enlarge your photos to a size larger than 11x17, you probably don't need to be shooting in RAW (unless you just want to try it out for fun).

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