Digital Photography - RAW Images

prosportimages · Mar 5, 2005

Hi all, Today I took the advice of most experts / magazines etc, and started shooting in Raw mode. I understand that this allows me to make any adjustments etc myself later in Nikon Capture, rather than allow the camera to do this itself.
Thing is, once I am happy with the results of my adjustments, should I then save the pics as Jpegs (so that I can print them out) or what ?
I assume that if I want to keep the pics for future reference or use, I can store them on CD in original RAW format, with maybe a Jpeg copy of it for printing.
I'm a little confused here folks - your advice would be welcome.
David.

photobug · Mar 5, 2005

The first thing I do is burn the whole card to CD. Then I load them in my computer to view/convert. I use Photoshop CS to convert my RAW images, so I just save as .psd files. If I want to put them up on the web, or send them out for prints I then convert to jpg.

The reason I save in .psd is to preserve any layers I've created while manipulating the file. If you go straight to jpg and want to adjust something you get to start all over again.

AIRIC · Mar 5, 2005

You can get a NEF plug in for CS at the Adobe website. I just did it a few weeks ago so I don't have to use two programs. I burn the neff files to CD and convert most the prints to TIFF and burn another CD. Then I print and post jpgs.

Eric

Digital Matt · Mar 5, 2005

I would convert to tiffs. You can save layers in photoshop, yet add lossless compression so they are smaller files than PSDs.

sdbphoto · Mar 6, 2005

If you want optimal image quality. Shoot in RAW, this captures mazimum colour density available to your camera. Then depending on your usage do the following.
Web/email: convert to .jpg no larger than 100K >Photoshop Save to Web, will do this.
Small happy snappy prints convert to .jpg > no need to downsize just save at maximum
Anything going to a magazine publishing or larger prints, save as TIFF files. TIFF will give you the maximum colour density as the RAW file, but in a usaable file format.
RAW is just a camera manufacturers proprietary format for max file size storgage.
Hope that helps...