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To fuel the whole digital photography and editing discussion I figured I’d give a brief little demonstration of the amazingness of shooting in RAW, as opposed to JPEG. Right when I got my computer fixed a couple weeks ago I was going through my older pictures and I came across this one. Now, this is not a good picture, so bear with me for a minute here.

Here’s the original:

I like the composition with the train and everything but the sky completely ruins it for me. It is so completely overexposed that if I had shot this in JPEG it would be beyond rescuing in photoshop. The best thing photographically speaking would probably be to wait until a later time for the sun to go down so the sky isn’t so bright and you can correctly expose both the bottom half of the picture and the top. I didn’t do that though, accepting the lesser image and moving on.

Here’s where RAW comes in. RAW means your camera doesn’t automatically compress the picture into JPEG, it saves all the details it possibly can. This makes it take up more space, takes much longer to load and edit, and is generally a pain in the ass, but the flexibility it leaves you more than makes up for it.

The original picture was exposed at normal 0 exposure level. From it using my RAW converter program I can extract an image that’s exposed to the equivalent of +2, and one exposed to the equivalent of -2. The -2 image, as it’s darker than the original, rescues the clouds for me, yey! The +2 image rescues some of the darker details lost in the bottom half of the screen.

Once I have the original exposed image, the +2 overexposed image, and the -2 underexposed image, I can combine the 3 of them using ancient Chinese secrets (*cough Photomatix *cough*) to get an image that looks better. Here’s an ugly little chart I made to show the differently exposed images and the combined photomatix image.

Now I finally have something reasonable to distort! Here’s what I ended up with:

It’s certainly not perfect or anything, but I’m happy with it and I learned a few things along the way.

Here is the sequence from original to combined exposure to final image. You can click on the top left or top right hand corner of each image to scroll through them for a more dramatic viewing effect (ohhhh!) that I would highly recommend.