The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion

RAW SHOOTING

RAW HASSLES THE DISADVANTAGES

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raw converter than you will out of a JPEG file that’s been processed by the cam-

era. It’s a slim chance, because the JPEG quality in the XSi is very good, but for a

tricky image it can be important.

Finally, the raw file is truly like a negative. It’s simply raw data, and the final image

that results from that data depends on the software you use to process it. Raw

conversion software is improving all the time as imaging engineers discover new

algorithms and refine old ones. is means that years from now you might be able

to reprocess the same raw files in a newer raw converter and get better results. In

the short term, this also means you can process the same image in different ways

to get very different results. For example, you might process the image one way to

produce a very warm result and another way to produce something much cooler.

By processing the raw file in different ways, you can achieve very different adjust-

ments without using up any of your image-editing latitude.

On the left is a fairly accurate representation of this scene; on the right is one that

has been warmed up. Both were processed from the same raw file.

Easy Batch Processing

With a raw converter, it’s easy to apply the same edits to multiple images. For

example, if you come back from a shoot and find that the white balance is off

on all your images and that they’re all ...