Shooting in RAW. Am I doing something wrong

[digabella]

I'm just getting started with photography (as far as I am actually shooting in Manual) and hubby was inspired by a photographer that he met on a plane that I should be shooting in RAW. I had tried before but honestly I didn't want to have to figure out how to open my pix when what I was shooting wasn't something I was being paid for anyway. So, he changed my image quality to RAW and I went and shot a bunch of pix. I have adobe elements and cs2 and I'm not very familiar with either. Anyhoo...after lots of cussing and trying several different things he downloaded some program for the elements 6 so that you can preview and then open up my .nef files. At some point we were looking at them and I noticed that it said 72 dpi. Not sure where that was among the attempts to see the nef's. Now, in elements, I can use this prog that he downloaded to see the nef and then it has a button to open the file. There it tells me the pic (nef) is 240 dpi. I realize that this is printer dpi rather than ppi for the actual picture. I just thought that a nef file was all of your info uncompressed so it would be much higher than that. Is the camera doing what it is supposed to do if it is only 240 dpi? With it set to RAW on my d40x, I don't have the option of picking Large/Medium so it freaked me out when I saw that 72 dpi and then 240 dpi. Hope this made sense.

 

[Derrel]

Yeah...240 and 72 are both common default settings for Nikon NEF files...rest easy--even though you might see that low, scary 72 number down there on the bottom, a Nikon .NEF file will still have the same high quality no matter if that bottom number is 72 or 240. The output size can be easily changed in the software preferences! So, no need to worry.

 

[digabella]

Thanks Derrel,
Whatever we looked at that was 72 dpi looked really grainy but the 240 wasn't so bad. I just didn't know if I had did something wrong.

 

[Big Mike]

That number is really only a setting that tells the computer how big to display it on a monitor. It's the actual size (in pixels that matters).

 

[KmH]

The PPI (Pixels-Per-Inch) number assigned to a photo has nothing to do with the size of a photo on a computer display. Good for you for knowing DPI and PPI are not the same thing, and are not interchangable terms.

The PPI assigned to a photo is only relevant when a photo is printed. Then the PPI and the pixel dimensions fix the print size. A photo having pixel dimensions of 3000 x 2000 assigned at 100 PPI will print 30" x 20" in size. The same 3000 x 2000 photo at 200 PPI will print half that size or 15" x 10" because there are twice as many pixels-per-inch of print.

Computer display is only determined by the photo pixel dimensions and the display pixel settings. My 22" editing display is set to 1600 x 1200 pixels. At a 1:1 display size I can only see a bit more than half of a 3000 x 2000 pixel photo on my display without having to scroll.

Some notes about Raw:

• You cannot see the Raw image data file, nor the Raw histogram, on your camera. The camera makes a JPEG Basic and it's histogram that you can see on the camera's rear LCD. That JPEG has been edited.
• None of the in-camera settings for sharpness, contrast, saturation, color-space, white balance, etc are applied to the Raw file. Some of the settings, like white balance, are recorded but not applied.
• Raw image data files have to be converted outside the camera by Raw conversion software to be made into an image. Each Raw converter application uses slightly different algorithms to do the conversion, so they all look a little different from each other.