Improve a photo's tonality

Make your pictures’ colours punchier with Affinity Photo’s Curves tool.

- Dave Stevenson

A common experience among new DSLR camera owners is enthusiastically setting their cameras to shoot raw images, spending a few days shooting, then puzzling over why their camera has failed to gather the colours and saturation they swear were in front of them when they took those pics.

The problem is image format. When a DSLR camera captures a JPEG, it applies a round of processing to the raw image data from its sensor before the data is compressed and saved. That processing typically includes a healthy dose of saturation to make colours appear richer, as well as a touch of sharpening to make images look clearer. Depending on your camera you might get other options – perhaps a faux vignette, or various colour treatments such as in-camera Lomography style effects, and so on.

Raw files are a different kettle of fish. When shooting in raw, a camera gathers as much data as possible, and saves it in a proprietary format devoid of any processing or compression. These files need to be processed and saved in a more accessible format, such as JPEG or PNG, before they can be displayed online. Because raw files are unprocessed, they lack the polish, sharpness and saturation of a more carefully prepared image. The benefit to using them is that you get more latitude when it comes to correcting things such as under- and overexposure, because a raw file contains more data than a compressed JPEG. (Raw is now an option in some third-party camera apps on iOS 10, too.)

Bring raw images to life

One industry-standard way to restore life to a photo that could use more punchy colours is to use a curves tool, which is a feature of many photo editors that provides you with a fine-tuned way to tweak the brightness of particular tones within an image.