Oops! Another Reason to Shoot in RAW

As the volunteer bench coach, score keeper, and self-appointed photographer for my son’s little league team, I’m flirting with photographic disaster. Last week, I followed my usual routine – balancing camera on scorebook for 6 innings and shooting whenever possible. However, as I began to download the day’s images into my Aperture library, I quickly realized that sometime during the first inning I had inadvertently bumped the control dial on my 40D causing a switch from aperture priority to manual exposure. Almost all of the subsequent images were grossly overexposed. I know what you are thinking – I should have noticed this immediately while reviewing the images on the camera’s LCD…oops!

Rather than send the images to the digital graveyard, I decided to experiment with Aperture and Photoshop to see how much information could be salvaged. After adjusting the exposure and levels in Aperture, I used the Recovery and Highlight sliders to bring some detail back into the image. I then opened each image in Photoshop Elements (using Aperture’s roundtrip feature) and duplicated the background layer twice. The first duplicate layer was converted to black and white and the second duplicate layer was changed to either a Multiply, Color Burn, or Linear Burn blend mode. Here is an example of the results:

While this is not destined for the cover of SI, it does have an interesting pop art feel and it demonstrates the incredible amount of information that is stored in your RAW files.

RAW, Aperture, digital processing

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Should I Shoot in RAW Format?

Yes! As a “serious amateur”, you might find that you occasionally (?) misinterpret a scene – maybe the white balance is wrong, exposure is off, or you missed the distracting objects in the frame. If you shoot in RAW format, you maintain the greatest control with respect to your post-processing options. As opposed to JPG , where the camera makes some processing decisions for you and chooses to throw some of the image data out in favor of a smaller file size, RAW files contain all of the original image data. When working with RAW files in your image processing software, you will have the opportunity to correct the white balance, tweak the exposure, recover highlight and/or shadow detail, and crop/clone out distracting objects with little loss of image quality.

Yes, RAW files are big and quickly eat up SD/CF cards. However, memory cards are relatively inexpensive – particularly when compared with the prospect of lost opportunity to save a potentially great image.

Additional Resources:

JPEG vs RAW

Why RAW?

RAW Shooting

JPEG vs RAW

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