If I shoot in raw then use the crop function on the camera, is my newly cropped photo saved on the camera as a JPEG? Nikon D40X soon D80. Seems like my raw's became jpegs once I started cropping. Am I mistaken?
Huh? In camera cropping? I don't have a D40 or D80 but D200 and this feature doesn't exist as far as my limited knowledge goes. We crop outside the camera during PP. You choose the format (RAW or JPG) and quality of JPG (small, fine, etc...).
The idea is to get as much from the camera as possible...with as little 'editing' as possible. That way, you have full control when you get the image back to the computer.
You are probably not mistaken. I am an olympus shooter and take only Raw shots myself. I recently learned that if I do any editing to a raw shot through the camera, it makes a jpeg of the raw. I read up on this for the faq section of the olympus web site and learned that it creates this jpg so the raw file remains intact and unchanged. This to me made sense, given the fact that even photshop's raw converter will also keep your raw frame intact but any editing changes are only recorded in a separate file which get applied when viewing. You camera is probably doing this same thing. From what I have seen in the digital photography world, is that Raw is edit-proof. You can't edit the original Raw file. You can only view it edited, but the raw file itself will never change.
The RAW format is little more than a two-dimensional grid with the values from every cell of your CCD. Everything with a CCD has the potential to produce a similar file, whether the manufacturer exposes it to the end-user or not. It often requires less processing logic (but a lot more memory) to produce a RAW file than a full-blown JPEG. I had the opportunity a while back to briefly operate a professional-grade telescope (owned by my school, not mine [sigh]) and a RAW-like file is pretty much all you could get out of it: the rest is post-processing. On digital cameras there is quite a bit of metadata thrown into the mix, as a digital telescope doesn't really need to bother with things like depth of field, or apperture, or even focus. The resulting file is then compressed with some form of lossless compression and that's basically what you get as a RAW file. It does not make sense to edit a RAW file as this is not the image itself, but rather all the ingredients for it along with the recipe. When you "edit" a RAW file, you merely change to the recipe, not the ingredients (the data). You don't "crop" a RAW file, you merely tell the RAW file viewer to crop when showing it to you and you can always restore the original image after that. Data is never being thrown out as the two-dimensional grid with the original values is always there and is never changed once recorded. For this reason the RAW format allows you to do things like "restore" colour information in a black-and-white shot during post-processing. Your camera doesn't want to change the receipe for the RAW for some reason and has instead rendered the RAW into a JPEG for you. This, however, is only useful (or meaningful) if you will be printing your photos straight from the camera, without first downloading them into a computer. My guess is that your camera is rendering RAWs into JPEGs for you because it cannot print RAW files on a printer directly. I hope this helps you in some way.
gendarmee, I am not sure what you are using so that I can recommend software. I know Windows Vista has RAW support built-in. I know MacOS has had RAW support for a while now. You can also use Canon's own proprietary software for the purpose (it is good for that at least, I find it awkward to use with all these windows all over the place interacting in mysterious ways).
I have also had some success with Irfanview and their thumbnails program view CR2 files for a quick look. But mostly I use Bridge.
I have the D300 by NIKON and I do believe you can do on camera cropping.I will have to check for sure. Marshall
Yeah I know what he means about in-camera editing, I never use it though. It's pointless if you have any type of PP program for the PC.
