On 1/29/2016 8:53 AM, Mayayana wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by RAW,

RAW is the best way to take photos. For
posting to Facebook, a JPG taken with a phone
is fine, but for people who are serious about
cameras, a camera that offers RAW format is
the sensible option. RAW is actually not just
one format. It depends on the camera. But in
general it's a format that contains a lot of the
exposure data. It's the data from the camera's
sensor. There are also editors specifically
for RAW editing. Once the image has been worked
on it can then be reduced to a 24-bit bitmap for
digital processing or printing. But a bitmap is
a reduction.

Example: When I was first trying out RAW options
I took a photo of a cyclamen in a dimly lit room. The
image was so dark it was mostly gray tones. As
a RAW image I was able to brighten it to bring out
the pink flowers, like turning on lights in the photo.
If that image had been saved as JPG then brightening
would have only lightened the gray pixels, because
a JPG is just a compressed bitmap. There's no extra
data to get out of it. The image points are already
set as 24-bit-color-value pixels, so there just isn't any
pink/red in that dark photo.

Storing it as BMP (or TIF, which is usually just
a compressed BMP) is good once optimizing has
been done in RAW, but if you don't start with RAW
it's like starting with no camera settings options.


Well said, thanks. While I use RAW, and like it, I'm not sure I
could've explained it that well.