Be a Better Photographer- #3 Shoot RAW

Please don't hate me because I shoot RAW.

In this installment of How to Be a Better Photographer (or If Soren Does it That Way, it Must be the Right Way, Right?) I am going to discuss RAW shooting and why you should do it too. I know that sounds like a terrible idea, and I resisted it at first too, but I am here to convince you to shoot raw and improve your images.

RAW is a file format that contains all the information that your camera was capable of capturing in any particular image. In contrast to RAW is the jpg mode that most everyone is familiar with and used to shooting in. Each jpg you shoot throws away information! It lock the exposure, it locks highlight and shadow clipping, it locks the white balance! Your camera is capable of so much more, if you would just give it a chance.

Shooting RAW takes up more memory on your cards, so you can fit fewer images on each card. Some people see this as a bad thing. But I'm here to tell you memory is cheap! In fact you can by compact flash memory cheaper than professional film and developing. That means if you shot RAW images on inexpensive cards and never threw them away, and just used a new card every time it would be cheaper than shooting film was in the "old days".

I don't recommend this however. I have read that Compact Flash cards are a great storage medium, and that they should last longer than DVD's or CD's, but there is one major problem with Flash Memory drives. The problem is that they can fail and not store images at all, or store them for a short period and then loose them. But fortunately this usually happens all the time and right from the beginning of a cards life. So, you should never use a new card at a wedding. All Wedding cards IMHO should be filled up and emptied of images at least twice to see if there are any problems, and then after that the chances of them failing are super small. I usually test new cards with family fun shots, or little shoots that I know I can re-do with little effort or embarrassment.

So Golden Rule #1 Never use a new flash card at a wedding!

I used to think that shooting RAW would take up more of my editing time and that that was why I shot 1/2 my wedding images as jpgs for several years.
That is no longer true. In fact with RAW shooting I think my computer time is now less than it used to be. And with Memory and Hard drives so cheap, there is no reason not to shoot RAW from now on.

What is so intimidating about shooting RAW is that you have to convert every file into a jpg or Tiff in order to print or see them without special software. But don't let it be intimidating, embrace it and learn how to convert your RAW images, and that will make you a better photographer.

I must make a couple of admissions at this point. Admission #1 is that Iu se PC's not Mac's, I can't even really help you with Mac specific questions.
Sorry about that. I'm just not a Mac fan. With my photo booth business
(www.fortunephotobooth.com) and photography studio I have at least 10 different computers working at a given time. Mac's would have either bankrupted me or kept me from expanding as fast as I wanted to. Admission
#2 is that I don't use Adobe Lightroom to convert my Raw images, I use the free software that comes with Canon Cameras called Digital Photo Professional or DPP for short. Its free, it works, it lacks some bells and whistles but you can always use lightroom for a few images if you have to, and the biggest reason I haven't switched to Lightroom like everyone else I know is that I think The skin tones of the converted RAW images are better from the free DPP than Lightroom. Lightroom has made some strides with newer camera profiles, but I am still not comfortable with the "look" of the images from Lightroom.

So If you have a Canon Camera, Shoot some RAW images, Over expose some, and underexpose some, and shoot some regularly. Open DPP and browse to the folder that has your new images. Select them all or a few and click the Edit Image button. In the tools panel that pops up you can adjust the brightness of the image to recover blown highlights or recover blocked up shadows, You can change the white balance and the sharpness, adjust the saturation (you can even turn it black and white or sepia toned), and highlight and shadow clipping. You can also reduce noise in the image and lens distortions too. All that and when it converts the image to a wonderfull looking perfectly exposed jpg file so you can print it or view it online, then you still have the original RAW file to play with in the future. You can do all this in Lightroom too, and its worth a try, the workflow can be a little better, but it is harder to master and maybe a bit intimidating at first.

Here is my favorite part: If the software improves in the future (and it always does) you can reconvert old RAW files and produce even better images than you can right now. I do that with my old D30 files and it is worth it!


See how much better you can make some of your underexposed and overexposed images. See how much control you now have. At weddings you are bound to take many exposures that are less than optimal. Even I sometimes underexpose an image ;-) Shooting raw and just changing a few exposures in your files can keep you from having to open any images in Photoshop, and that my friends, saves time.

If you want jpg files straight from the camera, you can set your camera to capture both RAW and JPG files, and even if you shoot RAW only you can still get a decent sized JPG file almost instantaneously from a batch of RAW files by extracting the embedded jpg file that is inside of them. I do this for quick and dirty web pages from batches of RAW images. For this extraction process I use Breeze Browser which is available from http://www.breezesys.com Breezebrowser is a great workflow help to me. When I drop images onto my hard drive the first thing I do is open them as thumbnails with Breeze Browser. You can mark images for deletion simply by pressing the space bar and then deleting them all at once. Actually it can be set to just move them to a deleted folder so you aren't worried about deleting ones by mistake.

I'll do an article on my Wedding work flow soon. While your waiting for that one with bated breath, send me your comments directly by emailing me at soren@fortunephotobooth.com I'd love to hear that you like the articles, or that you think I should be shooting portraits at Babies R Us. Either way I really care what you think, and I'm here to help you become a better photographer.


Cheers!

Soren Coughlin-Glaser