Adobe Camera Raw & Lightroom

Why We Need Them

The millions of microscopic sensors that collect light in our cameras’ photosensor arrays don’t actually record an image. Those sensors experience a bump in electric current when light hits them. The camera records the current passed along by every one of those millions of sensors. That doesn’t sound like an image, does it? It takes special software to interpret that electrical data and make pixels from it. So, Adobe has created these applications.

When we ask our cameras to produce JPEGs or TIFFs, which are made of pixels, the software that creates the image files is in the camera. However, we can often set our cameras to supply the raw data to us for other software (Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw) ...

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