[NEWS] What is RAW photography and should you shoot in it?

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What is RAW photography and should you shoot in it?





Credit: Ryan Haines / Android Authority


Smartphone camera hardware is increasingly powerful, and we’re seeing more and more impressive software to match. If you’re serious about making your mobile snaps look the best they can, you’re probably interested in shooting in RAW to maximize the editing potential of your photos. Fortunately, some smartphones have offered RAW shooting capabilities for many years. More modern handsets are helping to introduce more mature photographers to the format through advanced camera editing apps. See Samsung’s Expert RAW camera app*as a good example.

Photography enthusiasts undoubtedly associate the RAW format with professional photography and high-end DSLR cameras, but that’s no longer the case. Even the humble smartphone we all carry in our pockets can take RAW snaps, often with impressive results. If you’ve been wondering just what all the fuss is about, or even what photographers mean by the term, you’re in the right place. Here’s everything you need to know about RAW photography.



RAW photography explained



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RAW isn’t an acronym. Instead, it simply refers to saving raw data coming straight from the camera when you press the shutter button. In other words, you’re saving unprocessed, unedited, and uncompressed information directly from the camera sensor onto your storage medium. It’s also a file extension; you’ll see file names appended with .RAW to signify that they’re this type of image file.

However, RAW often isn’t the default output for a camera, especially a smartphone. Images are typically instantly compressed and saved in JPEG format to save on space. This smaller file size is achieved using lossy compression, which discards “unnecessary” data to save on space. However, this doesn’t mean that JPEG looks obviously worse; high-quality JPEG compression looks indistinguishable to the eye. As such, RAW image files can be up to 10x larger, depending on the number of megapixels and strength of JPEG compression used. JPEGs are also much more portable, the format is widely used on the web, by messaging apps, and more. It’s essentially the universal image format, unlike RAW, which is larger to store and more specialized in its purpose.

RAW stores uncompressed image data directly from your camera's sensor.

The image below is an example of how JPEG compression works to compress an image by changing and optimizing some pixels. Compression can cause a discrepancy or error signal when compared to the source, so JPEG is not an exact match for what your camera saw. But whether you can tell the difference by eye is another matter. It’s also important to note that cameras have to set the picture’s white balance, exposure, sharpness, and more before compressing to JPEG. This limits your ability to edit the picture later on.



The data lost with JPEG mainly consists of high frequency textures/details.

By contrast, RAW doesn’t apply any compression to the data. In fact, the format doesn’t attempt to correct exposure, apply sharpening, or any other image processing techniques to the data. RAW isn’t really an image file as such — the format isn’t even universally understood by different camera manufacturers. For example, you probably can’t open a Canon RAW image on your smartphone or editing software from a rival manufacturer like Nikon. Instead, you’ll need specialized software, such as Adobe Lightroom, or to convert your files into the universally understood DNG format, to take a look at RAW images.

Another difference between RAW and JPEG is bit-depth. JPEGs offer 8-bits of red, green, and blue color information per pixel. That’s still 16 million colors but pales in comparison to RAW’s up to 4.3 trillion shades of color. RAW files store up to 14-bits of color information per RGB pixel depending on the camera. Bit-depth is a significant factor in the file size differences between these popular photograph formats.

See also: Key photography terms you should know

Why shoot in RAW?



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It seems like RAW has quite a few drawbacks but not if you’re editing pictures. High-quality editing is the principal reason for shooting in RAW. For starters, converting to JPEG means that exposure, white balance, saturation, sharpness, and more have already been decided and locked in by your camera. While you can still edit JPEG files for white balance, colors, and even slight exposure adjustments, more extreme editing is impossible without causing clipping issues.

By comparison, editing in RAW allows you complete control over the look of your pictures. Plus editing this file type is non-destructive. That is to say; you can re-edit a RAW file and export it to any image file type you like, as many times as you like, without any loss in quality. Re-editing JPEG results in a loss in quality.

Read more: Your camera’s manual and other modes explained

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