Why RAW? Your images can look better over time.

I posted in another thread and was called a troll for stating a fact about RAW that I thought was widely known and deserves more discussion: one of its big advantages over other formats is that RAW files can look better over time. I'll explain.

Tom Hogarty, Adobe's product manager for Lightroom (at least in 2009) compares a JPG to a photographic print and RAW to a film negative.

 

Hogarty likens the situation to what he saw looking at prints in a museum by the famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams. "You could tell the earlier prints didn't stand out. They didn't have the same kind of depth that the later prints did. The printing technology and chemicals were getting better," Hogarty said. "Imagine if all you had was original print and you couldn't improve it going forward."

 

What this means in practice is that because the RAW format is sensor data that is interpreted (h/t /u/CrankyPhotographer) the algorithms that process RAW files can, and do, get better over time (for now, in subtle ways like noise reduction, and bringing up better detail in shadows). If any of you remember the crap-show that was Adobe Camera Raw 1.0 you are probably well aware of the dramatic improvements that Camera RAW CC 2015 has made in the last decade.

But, my point in the earlier thread was about weddings. I got RAWs of my wedding (paid extra, had an advance contract with this requirement) not for the gains of the past 7 years, but for the possibility of what my grandchildren could do with those files with computers billions of times faster than what is available today. It's true that software can't make a bad photo look good. But, can it make a photo look better? Absolutely.

 

Here's an article that describes this phenomenon with RAW: http://cnet.co/1Jblo9W

submitted by flitcroft to photography
[link] [297 comments]