Raw Power

Some photographers, especially beginners, do not take the full advantage of Raw files.

- Rohinton Mehta

Well, they shoot in Raw but in the Raw converter bundled with Photoshop (ACR), they merely click the Open Image button to send the Raw file into Photoshop, where they do certain edits. Doing so, you lose the numerous advantages of the Raw capture.

Main Advantages of Shooting in Raw and Processing the files in ACR

1. Raw files (whether 12-bit or 14-bit) contain much more data as compared to JPEG (8-bit) files. This results in final images with greater details

2. Let’s you process your images in 16-bit mode. Doing so minimises image quality losses during editing as compared to processing in 8-bit mode

3. You can change the White Balance as well as the Colour Space

4. You can adjust the Exposure (within limits) to bring back details in overexposed highlights (up to 1 – 1.5 stops of overexposure, depending on the make and model of the camera) and underexposed shadows.

5. Edits in ACR are non-destructive Besides these main advantages, you can do in ACR, almost all the edits that you normally do in Photoshop.

Let’s take a Raw file and see how simple the editing is. To keep things simple for beginners, I have purposely taken an image that does not require too much editing.

Note: Ensure that you are editing in 16-bit mode. To do that, click on the blue Workflow Options link (PS 1) at the bottom of your ACR screen. The Workflow Options dialog box (PS 1A) will open. Select 16-bit in the Depth field. You need to do this only once, unless you want to switch back to 8-bit working (I don’t know why you would ever want to do that!).

6. Open the Raw file. It will open in ACR. (I am using Photoshop CS6). Ensure that the Highlight Clipping Warning and the Shadow Clipping Warning are enabled (PS 1B).