Using RAW

speedyink

speedyink

VIP Member
So I bought my new camera which has RAW support (one of the reasons I chose it), but now that I can take them, I'm not sure how to use them to they're full potential. Adobe lightroom seems to be able to do just as much with a JPEG as it can with a RAW, when I was under the impression that you could do so much more with RAW images in this program. Is there other programs which can tweak RAW images better? Also, which HDR stitching program does RAW the best? The program I use doesn't take my RAW files.
 
What kind of camera did you get? My canon came with a fairly powerful converter program, but I opt to open them right from photoshop using the import utility. You may chack out raw shooter essentials as well which I use at work and is pretty good. For hdr, again, photoshop is your best route.
 
Panasonic Lumix FZ-18. It came with a program (silkypix), but I don't like it all that much. I much prefer lightroom. I'll have to play with the pictures in photoshop more and see what I come up with.
 
Photoshop has it's own RAW editor which is pretty nifty, you can adjust white balance, color contrast, perform noise reduction, etc. Lots of which can not be done on a JPEG, but it does take a lot of getting used to.
 
Try to think of a RAW file as a digital negative, something that has not been processed. You can make a lot of adjustments to a RAW file with very little to no quality loss. If you try to do the same with a JPEG you are going to end up with very poor image quality. I use Phaseone Capture One Pro, I find it a lot faster than Lightroom. You can download a trial here.
 
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