When I acquired my lovely Canon EOS 450D digital SLR camera earlier this year I was persuaded to move to shooting in RAW. As the name suggests, this is the uncooked format that the camera itself uses before converting to JPG. Compact cameras, and the default mode of amateur SLRs, is to generate user-friendly JPG for direct transfer to the computer. Easy. And I’ve taken thousands and thousands of them.

Using RAW, however, has the distinct advantage of allowing you to post process things like ambient lighting and colour balance, resulting in much better pictures. However this is also a disadvantage as you have to do this processing, even when the gain is quite small.

So here am I, in October, processing RAW pictures from our summer holiday in July. While it’s great to remember good times, sunshine and warmth, it’s taking forever. Not only that, but my home desktop is short of memory, and the conversion programme is swapping like crazy which further slows matters down.

However the ability to change a slightly cold-looking picture into the warm Mediterranean smile it was always meant to be really is quite neat. Oh well, let’s leave those files cooking overnight.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.