Up here!

Posted by CraHan (Koolkerke, Belgium) on 12 February 2008 in People & Portraits and Portfolio.

Taking a step back from black and white today. This was a shot I had almost thrown out during the initial review of the shoot. The original had a lot of blown highlights across most of the image. It's one of those instances where I'm happy to be shooting RAW instead of JPG. I know, I know, I should have exposed the image correctly in the first place and I agree that using the RAW file format (DNG, NEF, CR2, whatever) should never be an excuse to forget about lighting and exposure in the first place. That said, there are definitely going to be times when you're happy your mistakes can be somewhat, dare I say, undone.

I think made the switch from JPG to RAW a little over a year and a half ago and I haven't shot a single JPG image ever since (not even with the Panasonic LX2). RAW files take up more space than JPGs, but disk space is getting cheaper though and with tools like Adobe Lightroom it's become easie to manage them like traditional JPG files. Edits are also non destructive, whereas each open/edit/save action will deteriorate your JPG, RAW files remain untouched.

Anyway, this is not really the place to give large exposés about the RAW format and why you might or might not want to use it. If you hardly edit your images and are happy with how your photos look straight out of the camera, there's absolutely no need for you to look into it. If on the other hand you like to post process your material then RAW might be for you. Then again, you've probably already used it for ages and I've just spent three paragraphs preaching to the choir :D

Suffice to say it saved my hiney in this case :P

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