What Are RAW Files and Why Do They Look Dull & Uninteresting When Processed Wedding Photographs Are So Much Healthier?

When digital cameras take a photograph they do so in RAW format which includes a huge amount of image data that can provide detail and colour across a broad range of tones, far more than is used in the final image you receive. There will be information on detail and colour for the highlights, the midtones and the shadows.

While sometimes a photographer might not need to make any adjustments most of the time, to get the best out of the image, or to suit a particular style the photographer might have, a photographer will make decisions on how to use all that information to arrive at a final image. Wedding photographers might select how much detail to have in the highlights and shadows, rather than have the highlights blowout to pure white or to lift detail and tone out of shadows that might appear to be pure black.Cameras do create JPGs from RAW files, but their way of doing things isn’t capable of choosing to do what a trained eye would - which is why most camera JPGs tend to be flat and dull looking compared to what a professional image editor can do with a RAW file.

You might not even notice this unless you process an image and see what you can get when you process it to your liking, adjusting for colour temperature, contrast, highlight detail, shadow detail, sharpness, colour balance, etc. When we process an image we are not retouching or manipulating a photograph, we’re simply looking to make it look the best it can be to our idea of what it should be - every photographer has their own style, and most of them would process the same RAW file in any number of different ways.

Here are six simple versions of the same file, the top left being straight from fatty-data camera RAW file.

The other 5 are straight-forward quick and easy High Intensity Imaging Techniques - quick HIIT fixes - we use to tone up fatty-data RAW files.

Remember, at Dublin Wedding Photography we don’t just give couples a selection processed High Resolution JPGs and dump the rest. We make our selection of photos to process from the thousands of RAW files that we shoot, but instead of deleting the ones we don’t select to process - because they’re too dark, too light, soft, a bit blurry, WTFever - we give you everything so you can faff about with them in your own time, and if you find a funny photo of Uncle Knuckles that we missed isn’t that better than it being consigned to oblivion.

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