Why you should shoot RAW

I recently had a conversation with a highly tech-savvy friend that went something like this:

"So, when you take photos, do you shoot in RAW format?"
"Yes."
"But you do RAW with embedded jpgs, right?"
"No."
"You don't even do jpgs?"
"No. Just RAW. I used to do RAW+jpg, but I stopped doing that years ago."
"RAW with no jpg? Are you kidding me? You are crazy, man. Do you have some kind of death wish?"

OK, so he didn't actually say that last line, but he was thinking it. He did say that he wasn't ready for RAW yet—which might be what you thought when you saw the title of this post. Maybe "RAW" sounds intimidating. I googled "raw" and the top hit was for pro wrestling, so maybe there's some kind of psychological transference happening, I don't know. But I do know that people tend to think it's for pros and therefore must be more difficult. Well, it's not. In fact, it's easier and way better.

I don't care what this naysayer writes in his way longer and more technical post, RAW is not just for people who want to spend all kinds of time manipulating photos and JPG is not the same quality as RAW. The purpose of my post is not to give you technical data in some equally long post, but just to demystify RAW and show you how great it is to use.

"But wait!" you say, "My camera doesn't even shoot RAW!"
OK. Maybe it doesn't, but your next camera will (or should). I googled "point and shoot digital raw" and got an impressive list of reasonably priced consumer cameras (from less than $300) that have raw capabilities. This is obviously not a pro-only feature.

But I heard that jpg photos look better than RAW! You did? Really? Or am I just putting words into your mouth so I can give the following brief explanation/disclaimer: What a jpg does is it lets your camera make all the decisions (like contrast, white balance, sharpening, etc.) in-camera, whereas RAW lets you make those decisions once you've loaded the files onto your computer. What that means is that jpg files have the at-first-glance headstart. But trust me, the trade-off is not worth it.

But I don't own Photoshop!
You don't need it. If your camera shoots RAW then it also comes with some sort of RAW processing software. Or you can use Aperture (I do) or Lightroom (same diff), either of which is not cheap, but cheaper than Photoshop and well worth the investment. I do loads of retouching in Aperture without ever opening Photoshop.

Really, now it's time to stop objecting so I can finish this post and do something important like watch a movie (the Netflix sleeve says "Hell hath no fury like an asthmatic nerd scorned in this scary British teen horror" What's not to like?)

Here's the recent real-life example that led me to proclaim my love for RAW files out loud and then decide to write this post (more effective and less dangerous than yelling from my rooftop).

One more quick disclaimer: What you see on your monitor and what I see on mine may not be the same, but hopefully this will make the point anyway.

The photo above is from a wedding I shot in Long Beach last month. I cringed when I saw how blown-out it was, but sometimes when you're shooting quickly in rapidly changing lighting conditions this happens. When I first saw the photo, I wasn't even sure if RAW could fix it.

In Aperture, there is an "inspector panel" that lets you see various settings. Even the processing software that comes with your (raw-capable) camera will have something similar.
There are all kinds of sliders (way more than in this screen grab), but I'm only going to use two of them here: temperature and exposure. That rectangle at the top shows the histogram (a mountainous looking thing that shows how the information is distributed from black at left to white at right). Don't worry about understanding the histogram beyond this for now: if it goes off the right, it's overexposed, if it goes off the left, it's underexposed.

Two basic adjustments that immediate improve the photo are to change the "temperature" (make it "warmer" or "cooler") and the exposure (in this case, make it way darker).

So I did two—oops, make that three—things:
1. I slid the temp over more toward yellow to warm it up a bit
2. I slid the exposure down almost as far as it would go
3. I slid the "recovery" up about halfway (I couldn't resist. It just brings the whitest parts down a little more).

And voilà!

This could get even better, but this is just to show how a few seconds of knee-jerk sliding can save a bad image.

For the sake of comparison, I took the initial image as a jpg and opened it in Photoshop to do some corrections using blending modes and curves adjustments—see, already more complicated. What I got was a more contrasty image that is just going to get worse the more it's worked on:
The corrected jpg above took more time than the corrected RAW and the results are not as good.
Let's take a closer look...

Here's a close-up of the corrected jpg image:
and here's the corrected RAW:
See how the hair is pretty much the same shade in both? But look at the skin. The RAW image looks way more natural. I could brighten up the RAW and keep it looking natural, but JPG will have contrast problems because it has less information to work with.

Here's a close-up of the corrected JPG:


It still looks really blown out, even though the bottom half of the image has plenty of dark shadows.

Here's the same section in the RAW corrected version:
What? There were lights there? And a textured wall? Convinced yet?

If I can go from this...
to this...
just by eyeballing the photo and sliding a few buttons around, there's no reason you can't get the same or better results. It's really that easy.

Thank you "Life with Kaishon" for a fun interview

One of the letters with an appropriate quote from my ABC Paris project.

Hey, Take-out photo readers...head on over to Life with Kaishon to read me on the opposite side of an interview. It was fun and I loved thinking about the questions she asked me.

And to all you Life with Kaishon readers who might have clicked over to my blog...WELCOME! Stick around and maybe you'll find some tips or inspiration. The theme changes every month and I post on whatever inspires me.

Eiffel Flowers: revisiting a discarded photo

I'm no fan of Photoshop's "artistic" filters. Just read my rant about pointillism. But that doesn't mean that I'm against manipulating images with some sort of artistic intent. The following is an example of coming back to a photo that was headed for the discard pile, looking at it in a new light, and using a revised version.

The original photo has pretty flowers and a generally good composition, but when I was sorting through which photos to give Wild Apple, I passed it by because the sky is "blown out." In other words, no pretty blue, no fluffy white clouds, just bright white. Blown out highlights and shadows with no detail are two of the top technical "flaws" that tend to bug photographers. I seriously question whether they are indeed flaws, or at least I think it depends on the style and emotion of a photo rather than on a fixed set of rules. Nevertheless, I was not aiming for a glaringly white sky when I took this photo, so I thought "too bad," gave it a low rating in Aperture, and moved on. But then I started toying around with a faux polaroid look (no, it's not one of those Photoshop artistic filters that I hate) on some other photos and decided that a blown out sky is as asset in light of the heavily smeared and dense color of polaroid style. With that style, the blank sky becomes greenish and helps set the tone for the rest of the photo.

Some people may react negatively, the way I did to the faux pointillism of Photoshop. Some people might prefer the first version. Or maybe you don't like either. Either way, the point is not universal appeal (if it is to you, then good luck with that), but rather something that appeals to me. The point is in the process of revision. First, I identified what bugged me about the original (i.e. white sky), then I thought of a way to resolve that problem (i.e. greenish polaroid sky), and suddenly I have a photo that I like (mostly. still not sure about the jagged border). An "Eiffel Flowers" photo rescued from the possible discards.

September Monthly Special: Revise, Reshoot, Refine

Original, snapped hastily in a rare moment without people sitting in them.

Revised: straightened, cropped, decided that the background was too static, added motion blur, punched up the color a bit, and voilà!

It's back-to-school time and since I am teaching four classes this semester—each of them with at least three writing assignments to grade— I know I will be pestering my students to spend more time revising their work. When choosing a theme for this month, I thought about three "Rs" of my photo taking process from my most recent trip to Paris: Revise, Reshoot, Refine.

I can't help but make comparisons between writing and photography (hey, etymologically, it means "light writing"after all). Here's what I wrote (and yes, it feels weird to be quoting myself) for some bio interview questions sent to me by Wild Apple (the company I recently signed with):

Probably because of my background in literature (PhD in French Literature), I think of photographic technique as a form of research and writing. I start with an idea, a concept, a sort of thesis. Just as I would use keywords to search a library database, I take my ideas out into the city and use them to create order out of all those possibilities. As a scholar, I have spent untold hours in the libraries of Paris pouring over old books and manuscripts, searching for the details that can take on new relevance and interest through my writing. As a photographer, I explore Paris as if it were a library filled with books—some of them well-read classics (the Eiffel Tower, the view from Notre Dame), and others, the overlooked stories waiting to be discovered. I am inspired by Victor Hugo’s assertion that when you know how to see, you can see the face of a king in a door knocker. In other words, the city itself has a language that the careful observer can learn to read. Of course, reading is not the only step. I also spend a lot of time revising/reshooting, editing, and refining. With Photoshop, I can literally cast my ideas in a different light again and again until I find the presentation best suited to the message.

So rather than focus on the more traditional concept of "composition," I want to think about the photographic print itself as a composition. In the selection and editing process, there is a moment when you decide "this is the version I'm going to print." How does that happen? How can we improve? What if we took a "finished" work and completely rewrote it?

My high school English teacher always told us that you never finish a composition, you abandon it. Kind of a negative way of looking at things, but that's exactly how my perfectionist tendencies speak to me:

perfectionist tendencies: You're going to turn that in? Really?

me: Um. yes. Why?

pt: It's just that, well, hmm. Oh it's probably nothing.

me: What's nothing?

pt: I'd probably make it more, you know—polished. But that's just me. Go ahead. Turn it in if you're happy with it. I'm sure it's very, uh, comment dirais-je?—adequate.

My perfectionist tendencies are a passive aggressive pain in the butt and naturally, they speak French. They love to say "impossible n'est pas français!" to which I reply, "Impossible is not French? Go into any store, ask for customer service. It's their favorite word."

But I digress...

My point is that shooting and editing photos is not unlike researching and writing a paper. Personally, I think it's a lot more fun, but it still requires work and attention to detail.

This month, as I sort through the 3000+ I took in Paris, I will be making a lot of editing decisions. Those decisions often involve revising my initial composition (i.e. cropping), and they always include refinements (or retouching) including color correction, noise reduction, and sharpening to creative choices. Sometimes, an almost-good-enough photo inspires me to go back and reshoot (which, for Paris, will have to wait until spring). For most of the month, I will focus on the many editing choices that go into a version of a photo that is worth the price of the print.

Note: I've decided to stop using "Mister Linky," but I still want you to participate by putting links in the comments. I'm looking at using a different tool based on a suggestion, but haven't had time to do it yet.