Would you like to capture better images in difficult conditions? The best way to do that is shoot photos in RAW format! A RAW file is an uncompressed image file that keeps all the data it gets from a camera. JPEG on the other hand is a compressed version of that, where most of information is cut out to keep the file much smaller in size.
What this means is that with a RAW file you can change much more than in JPEG - you can bring back a sky that's too bright, or make dark parts of image much brighter, with no loss of image quality. I use Adobe Camera Raw software to work with RAW files, it's pretty easy and in case you never tried it before I will show you some basic things that you can do to make your photos better.
Today I'm going to show you 5 photos that look ridiculously better when taken in RAW format and processed in Camera RAW.
Ko Chang sunset
You can see that I use just one panel here - the first panel, to begin I click "Auto" and let the software decide which level of brightness, contrast etc. is better for this photo. Then I drag the Highlights slider to the left until I see that all the brightest parts are getting darker - I want to bring back some of the sky color like that. Secondly, I drag the Exposure slider left until I see that the sky is dark enough. Finally I drag the Shadows slider right to make the shore brighter. And that's already enough to make this image so much better.
before - after:
More examples:
Sanctuary of Truth
before - after:
Sunset in Bangkok
before - after:
Island near Ko Chang
before-after
A selfie Artur and I took when we visited Uluwatu:
This time I'll take it one step further and make our faces even brighter by painting with a brush tool:
I set the brush to +0.50 Exposure and paint over the faces. Then I set Exposure to -1.00 and paint over the background to make it even darker
before - after:
It's not that important to shoot in RAW when you have perfect light conditions, but I prefer to use it aaall the time 😁
Can your camera shoot in RAW?
(I heard that even some smartphones can shoot RAW now)
All photos taken with Canon 550d
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, I'm still learning how to make good posts! 😊
