From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

What is a raw file and why must they be processed?

From the course: Mastering Adobe Camera Raw

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What is a raw file and why must they be processed?

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- There is no single type of RAW file. Rather, a RAW file is really a category of files. You see, RAW simply means the data that's been seen or captured by the camera sensor, and is then written to a file by that particular manufacturer. Typically, RAW files are everything that the camera sensor sees, and they're written in a file format that's usually native to a particular camera manufacturer. However, since RAW files tend to get pretty big, many manufacturers do offer compressed RAW files that allow you to get a slightly smaller to dramatically smaller file size, while still retaining most of the benefits of a true RAW image. Let's take a look at two RAW files. In this case, I have some images that I captured on my Sony camera. These are here inside of Adobe Bridge, which is a browsing application that's included with Creative Cloud. Let's just select them, and I'll right-click and choose to open in Camera Raw. This interface looks a little bit different than Lightroom, but the controls are effectively the same. Don't worry, we're going to explore lots of different ways of working with RAW files throughout this course. Now, if you look at this first RAW file, you'll notice it's pretty bright. I could see that by looking at it over here in the histogram where I see this very large spike in the whites area. If I click the Auto button, it attempts to balance the exposure a bit, and you see that a lot of information was able to be recovered. In fact, I can even just click on the histogram and further recover some of that data, pulling down this information, recovering that bright highlight, for example, by manipulating the whites and the highlight area just a little bit. This'll make it easy to balance out the image. Now, you might have noticed that there were some overlays here. If, for example, this gets too bright, you'll start to see some red pixels. That indicates areas where there's a loss of detail, but the Auto button pulled that back into a safe zone. Similarly, if we come in here and start to move the black slider, you'll notice some blue pixels. These are areas that have gotten too dark. These are cold or dead pixels. One of the main benefits of RAW is that it's very flexible and you can bring things back, allowing you to preserve details while not crushing or clipping color. Plus, we get tremendous latitude and overall flexibility. Watch, for example, as we change the base exposure here, how we can add or subtract light from the scene pretty incredibly. As you work with an image, a little bit of clipping is okay. If you get just a few blue pixels in some of the truest, darkest shadows, such as over here, that's all right. We also can change our white balance. For example, I could take the eyedropper and click on the gateway here, and now, it's restored a more accurate white point. There's a little bit of golden light here from the sun, but it feels like a more natural white point. You also can explore several different presets to properly balance the scene. Depending upon what you're doing, this scene could have been cloudy, or perhaps, daylight, and you see how it does a nice job of estimating color value. Now, below all of these options for tone, we have other choices for things like texture and clarity. If we press Command + and zoom in, you'll really start to see the effects. I'll hold on the space bar and pan up here. Look at how texture really brings out the stone surfaces. And clarity is going to enhance some of that contrast there. That's quite nice. Now, what's important is to not overdo these, so don't get too aggressive. We don't want to lose edge detail. I'll press Command + 0 or Control + 0 to zoom out, and it's looking pretty good. If we press the backslash key, you can see the before and after the transformations. Look at how that lost mountain range is coming back and how much better the colors look. It's really quite nice. Additionally, in the lower corner here, you can click to see some side by side views. Here's the before and after, and here's different views. This gives you the ability to try out different types of arrangements to look at the image, an interactive split, for example, or a side by side comparison. This really helps you evaluate the image and look at the changes to see what it is you've done. To cycle out of that, just keep clicking until you get back to a default view. Now that you see how these controls can work, let's move on to another thing that's related to RAW, and that's a DNG file.

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