What does “more control” mean?

So you have a camera that shoots RAW, but you don’t necessarily want to manually post-process every picture to make it absolutely perfect. While using Adobe’s Lightroom (4 out of 5 stars, June/07, p60) and Apple Aperture (5 out of 5 stars, Jul/08, p62) let you automate some of the process—especially if you like to apply the same changes to all your pictures—you shouldn’t assume you have to post-process every RAW image. You don’t. Most of the RAW pictures you take will display and print just fine without a lot of additional fiddling, assuming the software you use to print can understand the RAW format your camera produces. This is an area where having built-in OS X support for your camera’s RAW format really makes a difference in ease of use. However, if you do want to spend the time to fine-tune a photo, you absolutely want to start with a RAW image rather than a preprocessed JPEG.

So why is this useful? Because it lets you determine how your pictures turn out. Back in the heyday of film, experienced photographers knew what their cameras were capable of and what work needed to be done in the darkroom when developing the film and processing prints. These days, there’s a similar division between what you can do in-camera and what you can do “in post,” but the latter doesn’t require toxic chemicals or blackening out a room anymore. The first component of this additional control is what you can do when you first open the image in your editor of choice. Before you even start the process of editing the image by cropping or resizing it, for example, you can fundamentally affect how the image looks overall: change its white balance, increase or decrease color saturation, or change the dynamic range of the entire image. All of this put together gives you the ability to create pictures that aren’t even possible with a film camera and traditional photo-processing methods.

Ultimately, the answer to why RAW is better is entirely subjective and entirely dependent on what you do with your photos. But it’s precisely the fact that RAW delivers not just one but a range of benefits compared to JPEG that makes it compelling. Even if you don’t think you need RAW today, if you switch now and don’t really get into image editing until later, you can always go back and apply all that you learn to your archived images. In a time of ever-evolving technology, shooting RAW is the best way we’ve found to future-proof our digital photos. 

Some Apps Taste Better RAW

When opening a RAW image in Apple’s Aperture 2, this format’s flexibility really shines. While the variety of editing options is undeniably daunting, this same breadth of choice allows you to fine-tune the image until it’s just right.

If you’re looking for software to work with your RAW images, you will find powerful tools in Apple’s Aperture 2, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and CS3. But there are also some lesser-known tools out there, many of which are quite inexpensive, that are worth a look.

Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter  Adobe Camera Raw (part of Adobe’s image-editing suite, www.adobe.com) is the gold standard in software that imports RAW images for editing. DNG Converter lets you individually or batch convert your RAW files into DNG format, without any editing involved.

CHDK  If you already own a Canon point-and-shoot, CHDK (free, chdk.wikia.com) can make it capable of shooting RAW. Installing CHDK requires determination and a willingness to embrace the command line in Mac OS X, but it beats buying a new camera. We tried it with the Canon PowerShot SD870 IS ($299.99, www.usa.canon.com). For full details, see www
.maclife.com/chdk.

Lemkesoft GraphicConverter  A veteran Mac graphics app that continues to improve, GraphicConverter is a steal at $35 (www.lemkesoft.com). Over the years it’s added broad RAW support, as well as features specifically aimed at those producing Web graphics.

dng4ps  For processing the RAW files produced by CHDK on the PowerShot SD870 IS, we found dng4ps (free, spebbe.googlepages.com) to be the most convenient solution, since it created a DNG file that all the other apps we tried could also open.

DNG! It’s a Digital Negative

Among the downsides of shooting RAW is the grim reality that there are almost as many RAW formats as there 
are RAW-shooting cameras. This is annoying for purchasers of new cameras, who often have to wait a while until their software of choice adds support for their camera’s RAW format. It’s also tough for software developers, who have to spend a lot of 
time and effort constantly adding new 
RAW formats.

Adobe, one of the companies most affected by the never-ending stream of new RAW formats, decided to do something about this and, in late 2004, announced the DNG format, which is short for digital negative. Adobe’s idea was to have a single 
RAW format that all cameras could generate and that would therefore be compatible with any software that supported DNG.

Since then, however, the number of cameras that shoot DNG natively has remained quite small, and none of them are from big players like Canon or Nikon. As a result, the number of cameras supported by Adobe’s own Camera Raw software is upwards of 175 and growing. Leopard has built-in support for DNG, so in most cases you should be able view a DNG file in Preview without incident.

One of the benefits of converting a camera-specific RAW image to DNG is that the typical file size decreases significantly—10 to 40 percent according to Adobe, a figure that we were able to corroborate converting RAW images to DNG using dng4ps—due to DNG’s lossless compression. According to Adobe’s Lightroom blog, 40 percent of Lightroom users who import non-DNG images have set the preference to auto-convert to DNG on import. While we don’t know precisely why these users make this choice, it shows that DNG is a useful format for those using Adobe apps. The good news is that all 
the apps we tried that had RAW support had no difficulty with our DNG test 
images.

Adobe is determined to make DNG a standard, despite the thus-far-underwhelming support from the heaviest-hitting camera makers. Adobe updated the specification to version 1.2 in May, and has submitted DNG as a vendor-neutral standard to ISO, the International Standards Organization, in the hopes that DNG will be viewed less as an Adobe format and more as a solution to the problem of the ballooning number of cameras that shoot RAW. For more technical information about the DNG format, see www.adobe
.com/products/dng.