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The camera raw functionality in Adobe® Photoshop® software provides fast and easy access within Photoshop to the "raw" image formats produced by many leading professional and midrange digital cameras. By working with these "digital negatives," you can achieve the results you want with greater artistic control and flexibility while still maintaining the original "raw" files.
If you own a mid to high-end digital camera, or pretty much any digital SLR, you can shoot in a format other than JPEG. This format is called RAW and offers some significant advantages (as well as a couple of shortcomings) when compared to standard JPEG.
Let's first explain what RAW is. RAW formats capture the raw data from your digital camera's sensor and preserve it in a file for you to manipulate outside of the camera. No adjustments or processing are applied to the image data at all, it's simply a collection of pixel values at the time of exposure.
By comparison, when you take a photo in standard JPEG format, your camera may boost the contrast and saturation, apply some sharpening, adjust for white balance, and then compress your image into the resulting picture file. This processing all takes place in the camera before the file is saved. That means the computer brain of your camera has to make all of these calculations and adjustments before saving the file to your camera's memory.
When using JPEG, your picture has already been processed and compressed once before it reaches you for the first time. On the other hand, RAW formats are more like a traditional film negative. They contain the raw data captured off the sensor, and they need you to "develop" them before they end up as the final picture.
Techniques or tips
Since so much is going on in the Photoshop world we're going to start a potpourri column that will cover a broad array of "stuff" we know you'll like, if you have any techniques or tips then tell the webmaster.
This site offers tips for Photoshop and Elements uses.
Laurie McCanna's Free Art Web Site offers over 30 Photoshop and Corel tips, and samples from her book, Creating Great Web Graphics.
Great techniques for Photoshop 7, 8, CS(9) and CS2(10)
Add Graphic Novel look to your images. Photoshop and Elements.
A quick way to give your landscape images the effect of a soft focus filter.
Curves and Levels, an important feature in Photoshop, have many applications. learn the basics.
Read about New Adobe Lightroom a new generation image management and processing application, designed specially for digital photographers.