Cornell Finch

Lifehacker has an interesting post and poll on shooting your photographs using the RAW image file format.

I have a new series of posts about photography for beginners starting soon where I will talk about things like RAW and JPEG so I won’t go into technicals right now.

Suffice to say that I shoot using the RAW format 99.99% of the time. Shooting with the Canon EOS 10d, the RAW format offers no in-camera processing, so while the post processing takes more time, it offers me so much control over things like exposure and white balance that I haven’t actually shot a photo in JPEG for about 2 years.

Obviously, my little point and shoot will only shoot JPEG so I am stuck with it, but decent photo editing software such as GIMP (free) or Photoshop (bloody expensive!) I can still produce a fairly decent image.

The poll results from the Lifehacker article (as I write this) sees 43.8% of camera users shooting RAW. I do have to wonder though about the type of person that reads Lifehacker. It strikes me that most readers are techie aware and will strive to get the most from their camera/software/you name it.

I am not sure that the ordinary guy on the web will bother looking at something like Lifehacker due to its nerdy appearance. With this in mind, how biased are the results going to be? I think that many will know what RAW is, the benefits it offers over JPEG and will be using it. Not exactly a fair results set.

I would start the poll over here, but I know that many of my readers¹ are nerds/geeks anyway. Therefore, even if you aren’t a nerd, please pop over to the Lifehacker post and vote in their “do you shoot in RAW?” poll.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Words.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.