PhotoAxe.com
Digital Photography Tutorials

RAW images contain unprocessed image data straight from the camera’s image sensor. Since the data isn’t processed on the camera you must do it yourself on your computer in order to get it into more usable formats like TIFF or JPEG.
.raf (Fuji)
.crw .cr2 (Canon)
.kdc .dcr (Kodak)
.mrw (Minolta)
.nef (Nikon)
.orf (Olympus)
.dng (Adobe)
.ptx .pef (Pentax)
.arw (Sony)
.x3f (Sigma)

Cameras that support raw files typically come with proprietary software for conversion of their raw format to TIFF or JPEG.

However, Canon decided not to add support for their D30 DSLR in their latest release of their Digital Photo Professional software, and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture and added the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF). As a response to this, on March 10th, 2005, OpenRAW (a Working Group of photographers and other people interested in advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files), coordinated by Juergen Specht, has been created.

Also, Microsoft’s Digital Image 2006 is able to recognize and organize RAW image formats such as .crw, .cr2, .tif, and .nef, which are file formats produced by Canon and Nikon. Picasa, a free image editing and cataloguing program from Google, can read and display many RAW formats, but like iPhoto (the Apple release), Picasa provides only limited tools for processing the data in a RAW file.

There is no single RAW format: different manufacturers use their own proprietary formats, which are collectively known as RAW format. Raw files contain pixel data from the image sensor usually at 12 or 14 bits per individual sensor bucket. These pixels are a mosaic of either red, blue or green values. o retrieve an image from a RAW file this mosaic must be converted into an RGB image (Demosaicing). RAW Data is preserving the maximum amount of original image data and offers greater creative control with digital images.

The contents of RAW files are often considered to be of ‘higher quality‘ than the RGB converted results, because you have finer control over the white balance, brightness, contrast, colours and saturation.

Note: RAW files are sometimes referred to as CCD-RAW

Tags: raw, raw format, raw files, raw image, raw conversion, digital raw, raw formats, raw file, iphoto, picasa, microsoft digital image, openraw