Develop RAW photo-editing skills
OUR EXPERT
Alexander Tolstoy is a long-time enthusiast of image editing using Linux. He hides his secret messages in Russian in underexposed areas of his photographs.
Almost everyone is a photographer these days thanks to smartphones and affordable D-SLR cameras. Taking photos can be fun, but it can become so much more – whatever equipment you might own. From starting out as a novice photographer, you can become an enthusiastic hobbyist as your skills improve. You can even turn pro and make money from something that was once just a means of capturing a moment in time.
Somewhere along the way, you’ll come across the phrase “shooting in RAW”. In this tutorial, the first part of a two-part series, we’ll explain what a RAW file is, how it’s an improvement on the JPEG format, and how you can use open source software to work with RAW files. Part two will cover advanced RAW editing techniques.
What is the RAW format?
When we take a photograph that’s saved as a JPEG, we often don’t realise that the camera’s firmware carries out a lot of enhancement steps automatically: colour balancing, de-noising and so on. In contrast, a RAW file is a minimally processed set of data taken directly from the camera’s image sensor. RAW files contain more colour data and therefore can provide a wider dynamic range and gamut, but they’re usually not yet ready for printing or sharing.
The cornerstone of RAW
