I bought a new camera a few months ago and it’s the first camera I’ve had that shoots in RAW format. I usually use the JPG files but occasionally I need to modify the RAW file – usually because of over exposed photos.

Because my photography is a hobby and I don’t do that much with the photos except for putting them on the web and occasionally printing them out I don’t keep all the RAW photos I take. The reason for this is that they take up a heck of a lot of disk space and I’m not equipped for that so JPGs suit me just fine.

Even when I do edit the RAW photo I keep the resulting JPG file, not the RAW file.

I wanted to share a couple of examples of how I salvaged a couple of photos from the RAW file.

The first photo here is the original and the one underneath is the result after editing it. I flipped it and I also tidied up that brown smudge on my wrist using some Photoshop wizadry. Goodness knows where the smudge came from – I’m sure it was JJ’s fault.

I wanted to keep the photo below of JJ and took it while praying he wouldn’t come off because sliding on the gravel would have been quite painful.

I probably over compensated a bit with the colours and saturation here but it certainly works a lot better than the washed out version above.

The only software I have to edit RAW files is what comes with Photoshop CS3 but that seems to do me okay. Lightroom would be the ideal I understand but I can’t justify it at present.

Just in case you don’t know what the heck RAW is, here’s RAW phto file format explained.

This video from Blurbomat shows how to adjust RAW photos using Lightroom.

What do you shoot in?