Develop RAW Photo-Editing Skills

In the first of a two-part series, Alexander Tolstoy shows how to edit RAW files as he explores open source alternatives to Adobe Lightroom.

- Alexander Tolstoy

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: color 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 color 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 processing is the assumption that a decent photo-editing program on a powerful PC can do a better job of improving the image than a camera’s basic firmware that’s locked within a limited performance range, dictated by the camera’s hardware. Thus the skill in editing RAW files is to manage the RAW-to-JPEG conversion process manually so that you outperform the camera’s own algorithms.