Unprocessed: Why I shoot RAW

Floyd, photographed above, is no stranger to this photoblog.  He’s been here twice before.  In fact, this very picture has been here twice, once in monochrome and once (flipped horizontally) in colour.  So why is he here for a third time?  Well, there’s a secret behind this photograph which I’ve kept quiet up until now.  It is a secret that is all the more surprising given that this has been one of more my successful shots, winning prizes and distinctions for me and representing Dublin Camera Club at IPF competitions.  And it pretty much sums up all the reasons why I shoot in RAW format, and why you should too.  It all starts with the straight-out-of-camera version of the above photo – an image which I think you might find a little surprising.

I sometimes make mistakes when I take pictures.  If you’re a photographer, I know that you sometimes make them too.  Everyone does.  There are different sorts of mistakes I make.  Sometimes I get the exposure wrong.  Sometimes I get the white balance wrong.  Sometimes my composition is awful.  Sometimes I use an unsuitable depth of field.  Sometimes I focus on the wrong place, or not on anything at all.  Sometimes I use the wrong lighting.  Sometimes I use the right lighting, but in the wrong way.  And sometimes I probably do all of these things at once.

I have tricks up my sleeve that I use to mask some of these mistakes, tricks that may or may not always work.  If the focus is off, a monochrome conversion can help to hide it.  If the composition is awful, there’s always cropping.  If the lighting is wrong you can use “arty” processing to make it look like that was what you intended.  All of these “fixes” (and I use the term loosely) require you to compromise.  That cropped, arty, monochrome shot was not really what you had in mind when you captured the frame now was it?

But digital photography does allow me to correct for some mistakes without having to compromise, as long as I am shooting in RAW format.  And the good thing is that of all the mistakes I make, the two mistakes it allows me to correct are two of the most common – getting the exposure wrong, or getting the white balance wrong.  As long as I can shoot RAW I can correct mistakes in these two aspects of an image without degrading the image, and that is a very good thing.

Normally, I don’t get things very badly wrong.  After the fact I might decide that my image would have looked better with an extra third of a stop of exposure, or that the white balance needs to be warmed up ever so slightly.

But for Floyd, I got things quite wrong in both these respects.  Very wrong.  This wrong, in fact:

Straight out of the camera

Eugh.

In fact, I don’t know how I didn’t delete the image straight away.  Well, actually I do – I never delete images on the camera.  And this image is, I guess, a good justification for that strategy too.

Now in my defence, and if you read the original post you will know, I had to hastily capture this photo as Floyd wasn’t going to play in the water forever, and I had just come from taking some flash-lit photographs of flowers with a tungsten-gelled flash.  That meant that my white balance was set to tungsten (which means daylight appears blue) and my exposure was using a fast shutter speed, a low ISO and a middling aperture, to correspond to the middling flash power.  That was all well and good when holding my flash a couple of feet from the flowers, but in my quick reaction to photograph Floyd a minute later, I didn’t think to compensate via flash power, ISO, or aperture for the fact that he was alot further from my flash than the flowers were, nor did I remember that in the previous shot I had been deliberately underexposing the ambient light.

I didn’t worry too much when I saw the above frame on the back of the camera though – because I knew RAW would come to the rescue, to some extent at least.

So step one when processing the image was to increase the exposure by two stops – approximately how much I had been underexposing the ambient by previously, and also about as much as RAW can help you recover without starting to lose detail.  That adjustment took me to this:

Increase the exposure by 2 stops

Much better, but still blue.  RAW format means that the camera doesn’t lock in a white balance, so you can adjust it in post-processing to your hearts content.  I can’t tell you enough how useful that is, especially at something like a wedding where you can quickly move from indoor shots to outdoor shots and back to indoor shots, shooting with tungsten light, day light, flash light and fluorescent light all within 5 minutes.

So for this image, a (pretty dramatic) slide of the white balance slider to the right takes me to the following image:

Adjust the white balance

Much better.  In an ideal world, where I had made no mistakes at the time of capture, the image on the back of the camera would have looked like this.  But no real harm done – I’m there now.

All that remains is to do the “usual” type of processing that I would to such an image and all should be good.

First up, let’s increase the contrast a little bit, mainly because one of the downsides of the RAW format is that it produces images lacking in contrast.  But that’s easily fixed:

Add global contrast

The shadow areas of the image are still a bit dark for my liking, so in Aperture I decide to try to recover that detail.  This being a RAW format image helps me out with this too, as there is more detail in the 12-bit RAW file than there would be in an 8-bit JPEG.

So playing around with the sliders controlling shadow detail takes me to this:

Recover shadow details

I’m pretty much done now – I’m happy with the exposure and the colour, and the level of detail across the frame.  You’ll also see that on Floyd’s body there’s a hint of that tungsten gel that was on the flash, thanks to the lossless white balance adjustment I did earlier which took everything back to the ambient light, leaving anything lit by the tungsten flash that bit warmer – and I like that effect here.

All that remains is to vignette the image – and I choose to do so quite strongly – to draw the eye into the ceter of the image.  This is something that’s done (or not done) to taste, and on this occasion my taste is for a vignette that looks like so:

Add a reasonably strong vignette

And there you have the image you’ve seen here before (and the image at the top of this post).  A straight forward monochrome conversion with a hint of sepia toning gives me the image as it first appeared.

If you’d like to step through the processing one last time (without sliding the page up and down) click on the image below or the play button at bottom left (assuming you have Flash support on your browser that is – sorry iPhone and iPad readers) to see the progression from the original file to the final colour image in 6 steps as a 30-second slideshow.

And if you have a digitial camera that supports the RAW format and you’re not shooting using it already, perhaps this post will encourage you to give it a try.  It’s best not to rely on it of course, but every now and then it’ll save an image that otherwise would have to go in the bin, and, like me with this image, that image may be the one that wins you most praise and even an award or two.