Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories

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Part I ✦ Understanding Digital Wedding Photography

The main drawbacks to the RAW format are that the files are large, slow to use, and they occupy much

more storage space. These same qualities are also the advantages to using RAW if you don’t happen to be

in a hurry. How big of an advantage is it? RAW files capture 4096 tones of brightness. To produce a JPEG

file, the camera deletes all but 256 of those tones. The difference between 4096 and 256 is a factor of 16.

That means you’re throwing away 15/16ths or about 94 percent of the original data.

To better understand this process, imagine that your file looks like a big comb with the teeth pointing

upward. To start out, the comb has 4096 teeth. These teeth are packed so tightly together that you

decide to go through and break out 15 teeth and leave one, repeating this process all the way across the

comb. When you finish, you only have 256 teeth left but if you squeeze the ends of the comb together,

you now have a much smaller comb that appears very much like the original.

The big advantage to RAW is in the editing stage. You can make changes to everything about the files

except the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture settings that were used to create the original image. You can

change the white balance, and you can make large changes to color and brightness of the image without

creating any banding or other ill effects. This is especially helpful ...