GETTING STARTED WITH RAW

This photograph was captured as a CRW (Canon Raw Format) file. It is an 8-bit file or 16 bits? Can you tell the difference? Image was made with Canon EOS D60 at 1/180 second and f/9.5 in Program mode at ISO 100. Lens was EF 22–55 f/3.5-mm zoom lens at 22 mm. (Pssssst: it’s an 8-bit file.) © 2004 Joe Farace.

I’ve been shooting with digital SLRs and digicams with RAW capture capability for

some time, but only occasionally used that format when making photographs.

Why? At the time, most of the software provided or sold to you by the camera

manufacturers for the explicit purpose of working with RAW files were simply

not that good, and were more often than not difficult and non-intuitive to use.

Fortunately, this is finally starting to change.

The process of converting from RAW to whatever format became more intuitive

with the availability of Adobe Camera RAW. All of a sudden the Adobe software

provided a logical progression from RAW capture to a working image onscreen.

Once the jump into Camera RAW was accomplished, the next question became

how many bits are enough?