Get a Raw Deal

Back in the analogue or film days,every ace photographer knew that the little guy in the darkroom could make or mar the final pictures. Some of the greatest names of the film era — Ansel Adams,for instance — were darkroom maestros themselves. With digital,the darkroom and its little man have shrunk to a chip inside the camera. Forget how good your camera’s lens and image sensor are,never mind the perfect technique,it’s the code on the chip that determines the final look of your photos. And if you want better results,well,you need to take over the darkroom ops. That’s the hard work — developing every single image yourself,deciding the right contrast,the amount of noise to suppress,to go overboard or not with colours,etc.

How do you do that? By shooting in “raw” mode. Every true prosumer offers the raw option in its file menu,usually above the “jpeg fine” or “superfine” quality level. A raw file is essentially unprocessed image data from the camera sensor. These files tend to be heavy (my Kodak P880 prosumer,for instance,produces 13 MB raw files against 4 MB jpegs). And that’s where the need for patience comes in. The circuitry of past-generation cameras struggles to push so much data on to the memory card,resulting in a brief lock-up (the P880 is out cold for 14 seconds after each raw shot). That’s one of the two reasons why most prosumer owners never took to shooting raw. The other reason — no longer applicable — was that memory cards cost a lot till a few years ago (my first 256 MB CF card cost Rs 1,800 in the grey market six years ago),so nobody wanted a 13 MB file when a 4 MB jpeg would do.

The heft of a raw file,which once seemed its bane,is actually what makes it so useful. Those extra megabytes,after all,represent extra information that the camera discards on processing and saving an image in the (inferior) jpeg format. While working in raw,you have at least three-fold image data to give your images an edge.

Although raw is the name given for unprocessed sensor data,it is not a file format,and there are more raw file extensions than camera makers. Nikon,for instance,has the .nef extension for its SLR raw files and .nrw for raw files from its new prosumers,such as the P7000 model. And since these are proprietary formats,your best bet is to work on the files with the camera’s supplied software. My Kodak EasyShare software,for instance,gives me plenty of control over the P880’s .kdc files. I can reset exposure,separately correct shadows and highlights and also control to an extent the lens flare (unavoidable when pointing a wide-angle lens into direct light). I also decide how much noise (the multicoloured dots mostly visible in underexposed areas) I wish to suppress.