Shooting it RAW
May 21st, 02008 by Alexander Rose 
Wired is running a good piece on what exactly the RAW file format is, and why you should always use it on your digital camera. It is a good reminder that most compression formats cheat us out of precious (but now cheap and plentiful) data bits, either through “lossy” algorithms or their very proprietary nature.
update: It was pointed out that in fact many RAW formats themselves are proprietary. This is a good point and care should be taken to be sure you store your images in an open format like PNG for the long haul.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:04 am
While some compression formats are proprietary, the JPEG standard is open and can be read by almost all image processing software (and will continue to be readable in the future). RAW files, on the other hand, are by definition proprietary and it is necessary to use manufacturer specific drivers to read them. There are many good reasons to shoot RAW, but avoiding proprietary formats is not one of them.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:21 am
The JPEG or RAW question goes a little further than “always shoot RAW”. Follow the discussion after the Wired article for some good commentary. My belief is that hard drives aren’t cheap, they end up in landfills after too few years and are a faustian bargain at best.
For many people the tradeoff is a stack of drives filled with RAW images that they don’t have time to process, versus a single hard drive with all of their images from the past 10 years that can be easily manipulated and catalogued in lots of interesting ways (i.e. memoryminer). It makes more sense to work backwards, how many images do you take in a month? What do you do with them? What is the aggregate filesize after a year, including edits along the way? How much do you have to spend both in the cost of hard drives and time spent copying from the camera to the drive, from the drive to BU medium, waiting for files to process, etc. Because you can doesn’t always mean you should!
November 19th, 2008 at 10:25 am
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