Marc Byram Photography - Photo Tips Blog: In the RAW ...

For those of you who attended my studio or location workshops prior to the end of 2009 the one thing you probably will remember is the I said it was a waste your time shooting RAW files, and to get the shoots right in camera would allow you to produce good JPEG for a quick and effective workflow ...... ... and to some extent I still believe this is good advise, especially for instance if you are an event photography shooting for prints on the night, medium sRGB jpegs are still the best file you can create and as the lighting will be the same on every shot, so you shouldn't need to fine tune your images before printing so you can go straight from camera to printer.

So why the need to shoot RAW files in other situations ...? the obvious reason is the ability to be able to change colour temperature and to some extent make exposure changes.For me personally I never used to like the files most other photographers gave me of their conversions from RAW to JPEG for printing, they always looked rather muted and lacking punch to the JPEGs I produced ... this was possibly down to not the best of of batch processing and also use of Camera Raw to do this.

When I purchased my first Phase One digital back this gave me no option but to shoot RAW, but I also I began to truly realise the possibilities to create digital image quality to levels I simply hadn't achieved previously, to do this the RAW processor I used was Capture One designed by Phase One and it wasn't long before I upgraded this software to edit all my RAW files from my Canon cameras as well as Nikon and Fiji from those shooting weddings with me. I can honestly say this was the best move I ever made. The work flow is very easy and the handling of RAW files is nothing short of amazing as it brings them fully to "life". So my advise is to shoot RAW and to process your files with Capture One, if you need to go into Photoshop that is fine, I still do, but only after the processing has been done. Saying that the Capture One guys continue to add more and more adjustments in their software most of which aren't in Photoshop, so I am finding the need to use PS less and less allowing me to do most of my work in the one workflow.