Not all Digital Cameras have the ability to capture images in the RAW format, though many of the latest ones do. If your camera has RAW capture mode but you don’t know what it is, then read on.

What is RAW?
RAW is not really the name of a file format. That is, RAW doesn’t mean image.raw. It is not a file extension. Actually, each camera manufacturer has its own extensions for the RAW file. For example, Canon RAW files use .crw and .cr2 extensions and Nikon uses .nef.

RAW files are basically uncompressed, perfect representations of what the camera’s image sensor captures when your press the shutter release. RAW images are totally uncompressed (RAW is raw). In contrast, with JPEG images, the camera performs tasks such as white balance adjustment, colour correction and image sharpening.

The most important aspect of RAW files is that all the colours are preserved as originally captured by the camera. This is usually 12 bits per pixel which if stored as a JPEG file would be reduced to 8 bits by pixel. This difference may not be much of use for a casual photographer. But for a professional photographer this is a huge difference especially when editing the photos.

But RAW has two main disadvantages:

• A camera takes much more time to save an image in the RAW format. For instance, while a JPEG is saved to the memory card almost instantaneously, a RAW image would take about 30-45 seconds.
• File size is another consideration. A RAW image file will typically be more than double the size of a JPEG file for the same resolution.

By default, Windows does not recognize RAW format images. If you try to open RAW images in Windows it will not open the image in Picture and Fax Viewer. However, you can download Microsoft’s free RAW image Thumbnailer and Viewer. This Powertoy lets you preview, see thumbnails, and print RAW images. You can also use Google’s Picasa for that matter as it supports RAW format.

RAW format is mainly used by commercial photographers to get very high quality photo with no loss of data. Once the RAW photo is captured and transferred to a PC, one can then go about adjusting the exposure, contrast, balance etc.

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