I’m a RAW Believer
Sunday, January 27th, 2008I took 2,544 photos while I was in Spain and Morocco in October. They were almost all taken in RAW format, which meant my poor hard drive has had to store 35 gigabytes these many months.
But now that I have Lightroom, I’m thrilled that I kept those files. When I made my first pass through those photos, I found about 100 that I really liked. I processed them with Photoshop, but only 35 made the final cut.
This weekend, I went through all of them again. With Lightroom, I could finally realize what I had envisioned at the outset for many of the photos. With Photoshop, there are so many things you can do with any given photo that it’s easy to become overwhelmed. But Lightroom makes it easy to immediately see how the photo will look processed with all of your presets. The trick, though, is to start with RAW. Jpegs processed in Lightroom are just vague, bland versions of their RAW cousins.
For instance, here’s the original photo taken inside the Atocha train station in Madrid:
When I revisited the RAW shot and applied my presets, I found this one that I liked better than the original:
But had I only saved the “original” version in jpg, I would have been left with this when I applied my preset:
Another example: an overcast day in Nerja, Spain.
The original:
The RAW file converted to black and white:
The JPG from the original RAW converted to black and white:
