I just got a brand new Canon Rebel XT! Very exciting

I'm assuming a good number of us are photographers in some way or another... right? I sell some of my work on iStockPhoto (link in sig) and I've made a about $1600, but most is just for fun.

This question is for all the other photogs here. Do you shoot in RAW? Is it really that much better? Do you need the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in to make the best of it?

So far the format has not impressed me THAT much, due mainly (I suspect) to the limited options in the Canon RAW converter.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: titaniumdoughnut,

I don't know, but can I have your camera?

yes, I shoot in RAW for everything but family/friends-type photos. I do use the Adobe RAW converter, which I actually like a lot. I use the cannon software only when I want to do quick and dirty batch conversions from RAW to jpeg (it's faster than adobe). I do think it's better. Colors seem more vibrant compared to photos taken in jpeg large. Things seem a little sharper (after moderate sharpening). Plus, you have much more latitude when doing post image processing. If you do have adobe photoshop CS, check out Russell Brown's website. He has some java scripts that will help you deal with batch processing RAW files in photoshop.

The RAW format won't perform miracles, but it will allow you more latitude in the 'digital darkroom'.

Thanks Joren - that guy sounds really familiar for some reason. I'll check out his site. I'm going to try to find a demo of the Adobe RAW software and do some experiments to compare it, Canon's software, and JPEG. I like the sound of the automatic bracket merging/high dynamic range features that Adobe offers

JW, I thought you didn't like Canons

I don't like Canon VIDEO cameras. The quality differences between their video and photo products are like night and day.

the great thing about RAW is that it saves all the original pixel information, and the settings you had. so you can change your exposure, your white balance, etc, and take the picture, but if later on you don't like it or your client is looking for something else, you can just go back to the original RAW and start from there.

me and all the digital photographers i know shoot RAW, and they use pretty higher end stuff like the Canon D20, the Nikon D70, and the Canon Mark II. they all say that at the level, it pretty pointless to shoot in anything else, since you're going to have to do a bunch of adjusting to get a printable picture anyway, so might as well start with RAW instead of trying to undo artifacts or color shifts or anything else.

Yeah, at the Mark II level RAW is certainly the way to go from what I've heard. I'm playing around with both formats right now, and using RAW when I know I'll want to do a lot of fussing later.

While it is technically true that JPEG discards some image quality it does it so well that all but the most difficult images and extreme editing won't bring out any visible artifacts. Unless you save again and again.

I keep hearing that you can change the exposure after the fact with RAW, but I can't see how this is possible. The exposure is based on how long the CMOS/CCD was exposed to the light. Does the chip save every hundredth of a second worth of exposure separately and allow the blending to be manipulated in RAW? How does it work?

Is this format (RAW) simply uncompressed images? If so, how big are the files at the highest resolution?

this is my first post!

I do video production for an amateur photographer, phil-flash, he shoots on an Nikon D70, shoots in jpeg mode using 4 gb cards. He doesnt shoot RAW bc he does very little post production to the images and theyre only used online. Still if I were him, i'd want to shoot RAW. He shoots so much content though that he doesn't have time to play with each image. If the images are bad he throws them out. I guess it just depends on what youre shooting. RAW does give you more latitude which is always a plus. Glad to be here on the forum too btw!

Welcome tripleAAA RAW certainly would slow up a work-flow like you friend has, so I can see his reasoning.

JW, RAW is basically the raw output from the chip, unaltered, processed, or fiddled with. That's why you need software to interpret it, and that's why you can change stuff without degrading image quality. I'm not quite sure how it works, but each camera has it's own format type inside of the RAW file as far as I know.

The files from the XT (about 8 megapixels) are around 7-8 MB in size. TIFFs of the same pictures are closer to 20 MB and JPEGs are 3 or 4. I don't know how RAW is so small.

tiffs are like uncompressed bitmaps, so they take up more info, i think.

you can change the exposure by manipulating the image, i don't think it means you actually change the shutter speed or the f-stop, since those things are related to the lens and the speed of capture. but you can make things darker or lighter (making it seem under or overxposed) while still having the f-stop you needed. so you can take a picture a f/2.8, but then still mess with it to make it look underexposed.

i don't know if that refers to what you're asking, but i always thought it was pretty neat.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I guess I'll have to see it myself, but it SEEMS like the result of the "exposure modification" can't be much different then that of a skillfully done levels / shadow-highlight / curves adjustment in PS. I'll have to play with this some more, I think.