Manipulating raw files

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Start Learning. Leave a Comment Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Having raw photos for editing lets you practice editing with professional raw files. Feel free to use these raw photos for editing practice, or however you like.

Raw photos are a type of file format used by high end cameras. Raw photos contain more information than typical photos which allows photographers greater flexibility in the editing process. Raw files are much larger than standard jpg files because they contain more information, and are not compressed or altered in camera the way jpg photos are.

There are many raw photo editors out there. From here, you can adjust values such as the exposure and temperature. Move the exposure slider to simulate the effect of adjusting your exposure in-camera. The results will be automatically reflected in the image. One of the most important reasons for shooting in raw is to be able to recover image detail in case something goes wrong.

Blown out your exposure so there are white patches of highlights everywhere? You probably will be able to bring some of this detail back thanks to the raw file. In the example below, you can see from the histogram that there are clipped highlights in the sky. If you need help reading your histogram, this article explains more. The highlights slider is the key here; moving it further to the left will bring back detail that was lost from the blown out highlights.

Extra image detail can be recovered by adjusting the exposure slider as well. To recover shadow detail, use the same technique as for recovering highlights. Simply move the slider until you see detail appearing again. Rather than setting a white balance value in the camera, when you shoot raw you can use any white balance setting and then adjust it in post-processing.

From the Camera Raw interface, choose an option from the drop-down menu that best suits your needs. There is another tool available in Camera Raw that provides white balance adjustment -- the white balance dropper. At the top of the window, simply select the white balance tool, and click on the part of the image that should be white. Then, Camera Raw will automatically adjust the colour temperature to make that component a true white. This is exactly the same as taking a manual white balance reading in-camera.

The examples above have mostly been working with images with quite obvious faults. Sometimes, there may be nothing wrong with your image at all but it looks a bit dull. Here is how to make an image pop with a few simple tweaks to the raw file. Below is an image taken on the camera's metered exposure.