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…