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RAW Power
Why you should be shooting in RAW, what it means and how to post-produce it
They say that the best camera is the one that’s with you and since the coming of the iPhone I find this to be really true. I’ve been always taken a lot of photographs and this got worse after I realized I was carrying one camera in my pocket, every day.
Mobile photography has improved a lot recently and, even if it is not yet as good as a “real” camera, the gap is narrowing. We’ll be having phones with cameras comparable to dedicated devices in a very short time. Having said that, the same rules that apply to digital cameras (or even analogue / film ones) apply to mobile photography as well: composition, light, aperture, ISO etc.
What I’d like to discuss here is the importance of the use of RAW images (I’ve been inspired by this very good article by Sebastiaan de With, designer of Halide, a RAW Manual Camera app for iPhone — yes, it means that it shoots with manual controls and the output file can be RAW too).
What does RAW mean?
Sebastiaan de With explains it with lot of details but, to cut it short, a RAW image is exactly everything captured by the sensor of the camera of your phone. Usually every shot you take with your phone is, let’s say, silently post-processed and saved as a *.jpg file. That means that, without you even noticing it, the photo you took is been processed by your phone, compressed and then saved in your photo roll. What you get is a photo that looks a lot like the one you took, but it’s not exactly the same one. Having been processed and then compressed means that lots of details are lost. Probably you’ll never notice that because “It looks good anyway” but the fact is that the output misses a lot of informations and, most of all, is not the original file. In other words: the image file, uncompressed and full of informations, is lost forever.
On the other hand, a RAW file has all the information, uncompressed. That means that you just have to extract them using the proper software. Where are usually all these details lost in a compressed file and saved with the uncompressed, RAW format? Basically in shadows (dark areas) or highlights (bright areas).
