was looking at RAW as well as JPEG. So does that mean it will look blurry regardless? Just trying to understand what you meant.
This gets a bit complex if you want to actually understand what you are looking at, but to really become proficient at photography you have to at least understand some of it! So lets dig into it a little.
First, you
can't look at the RAW data as opposed to a JPEG! Impossible! But the RAW file does contain an embedded JPEG image, and that is what you see when you "view" a RAW file. Just another JPEG!
So to view it, the RAW data has to be interpolated to generate an RGB image. The RGB image has three color channels, one each of Red, Green, and Blue and that can be printed or displayed on a monitor. There are several different formats to save an RGB image to a file, such as TIFF, PNG, GIF and JPEG. The file is in one of those formats but what you see is not! The data in the file is read in and expanded/adjusted or whatever before it is displayed. The catch is that some formats compress the data and some don't. Of the ones that compress the data some are lossless and some are lossy. If the compression is lossless then when it is read in and converted to just RGB data it will be exactly the same data that was originally compressed. But if it is lossy, it will not be exactly the same. However, another significant difference is that lossy compression usually does a much better job of compressing. Hense JPEG has lossy compression but the image files are much smaller. TIFF does not compress nearly as well and the file are much larger, but the recovered data is precisely the same because it has a lossless compression. JPEG compression is designed to throw away data that is not visually important, hence despite lossy compression the image looks the same when viewed.
So that is basically the difference between RAW, TIFF and JPEG.
Now lets think about your original question in regard to blur. The camera has separate Red, Green and Blue sensor locations, but doesn't have one of each for every pixel. The color of each pixel is determined using at least a 3x3 (and usually 5x5 or larger) matrix from the RAW data file. What's the significance? Well, if you have a color transition in the image that is very sharp, going say from Red to Blue along a very distinct line... the camera cannot record it as a distinct line. You might expect one pixel in your image to be Red and the one next to it to be Blue, but the camera can't do that. If it uses a 5x5 matrix to determine the color of those to pixels then the first pixel that should be Blue will have some Red in it due to the color recorded 2 pixels to the left. And that last Red pixel will have some Blue due to color 2 pixels farther along the line! Hence, pure Red will only show up 2 pixels on left side and pure Blue will only show up 2 pixels on the right side if the actual Red to Blue transition! That is "blur". With a 9x9 matrix the blur will be 8 pixels wide.
Except that is what the unedited image looks like. What it means is that every image needs to be "sharpened". Sharpening essentialy makes edge transitions shorter. Instead of 8 pixels, that might be changed to only a 4 pixel transition. But obviously it still is not a 1 pixel transition, so it is "blurred".
If we view it in such a way that there are at least 300 pixels to the inch on the display it happens that our eyes can't distinguish the difference in sharpness from a 1 pixel edge transition and a 2 pixel edge transition. Or for that matter a 4 or 5 pixel edge transition.
But while printers can print a 300 pixels per inch, our computer monitors use about 100 pixels per inch. So to get an idea of just how sharp an image really is we need to first crop it down to a size where each pixel in the image is displayed as 1 pixel on the screen. If it is any other size the display software will either duplicate some pixels to make the image larger or it will combine some to make it smaller. If we have a nice 1600x1200 pixel monitor, we can perhaps look at the image in a 1000x800 pixel window. And we want to crop out a section then that is 1000x800 to look at.
That is the only way to accurately judge sharpness of an image viewed on a computer!
And then you need to check tone transition edges to determine about how many pixels wide the transition is. If it is 1 pixel wide, it was made with an image editor, not a camera! If the edges are all 4 to 6 pixels wide, it is about as sharp as a camera can recorde them. If the transitions are wider than that, the image is relatively "blurry".
It really is that "simple"! You can find dozens of books with all the simple details too! Don't get too frustrated, just have fun learning.
