If you’re like me and many others, you like your photos served up RAW, and the RAW’er the Better’r. The OPENRAW.org has released the results of their 2006 survey which is also in a PDF file on their web site.
And speaking of RAW, I recently replied to a forum post where someone had asked about the difference between shooting in RAW or JPEG Mode. I replied with the following analogy, which I’m reposting here since there may be some readers who only know that their little Point-n-Shoot camera spits out JPEGs, and are unfamiliar with RAW digital image formats.
Think of your picture as food. If you have the camera set to do all the thinking for you, and you shoot in JPEG, it’s like buying a frozen dinner and popping it into the microwave. Once the oven beeps, you can add a little salt or pepper, but for all intensive purposes you’re pretty much done.
If you shoot in RAW, it’s like going to the grocery store and getting all the ingredients to make the same meal, except now you decide how much of this, how much of that, add more of this, etc.. Then when you’re all done mixing the ingredients (exposure, color balance, saturation, sharpening, etc.) you put it in the oven, and with a quick conversion – viola, out pops your custom adjusted TIFF or JPEG or PSD.
Of course, shooting in RAW means you spend a lot more time in the kitchen. (read: computer.)
