I hope these aren't daft questions, if they are I'm sorry I've just bought a Fui Finepix S5000 from Ebay, this my first "proper" digital camera & although i have a fair knowledge of general photography I know nothing about digital. Firstly what is a RAW image? If a camera is 3.0mp what does "interpolate to 6.0mp" mean? Thanks
RAW image is uncompressed and I presume interpolating upto 6mp will add in extra "detail" to make the image the size of a 6mp image, basically, it'll add noise to bulk up the pixels and size making it ****e
presumably for editing purposes, you can edit exposure settings etc without losing detail, jpeg files are compressed, for more advanced users...........
Gaz - I started doing RAW a couple of months ago, and wouldn't do anything else now as there is so much more you can do with your photos. Basically, RAW means that there is no in-camera manipulation and no in-camera compression, so the picture files are a lot more editable. However, it's not for the feint-hearted and if you're still learning with digital photography, perhaps you would be well to use .jpgs until you are more comfortable with it. If you do decide to do RAW, you could do worse than invest in Photoshop Elements 7 (70-ish on Amazon, but I just got a second-hand copy on there for 27) and perhaps treat yourself to a monthly magazine such as Digital Photo (about a fiver) which has lots of tutorials, both in the mag and the free DVD that comes with it. Good luck!
Like Stella im a recent convert to raw (after discovering HDR) on screen you wont really notice a difference in picture quality but you can manipulate the files to a greater degree.
also just for straight shooting in raw you get a much higher resolution, not noticeable on a computer screen but it you're going to want to print some images it's a great help. Jpegs are normally 72dpi (dots per inch) Raws are 240dpi. so great improvement in details.
Sure i read before some smaller size picture formats can lose slight quality if they are opened then saved again over so many times aswel.....
Yes, you did, Mike - that's the jpg files, and each time you save, they get compressed a bit more, so eventually you can see the deterioration. TIFF and RAW files don't, so you're better working with them, then when you have your pic as you like it, save as a jpg (at 72 dpi for on-screen or 300 dpi for printing), but save the original TIFF/RAW file as well. It's always best to keep the highest resolution of any photo or scan that you can. It's easy to make a lower resolution version of it when you want. But when you have only a low-res file, you'll never get the detail back again. All you can do is interpolate, which basically means that the software guesses what the missing bits are and does its best, but is never as successful.
Stella yes i used to be subscribed to one of the Photography mags a few years back that mentioned it, cool thing i liked was that the mag came with loads of video tutorials for photoshop that were good (think i still have them all) that you could play in one window then flip to your PS & try it while you paused it. Some photography sites mind when i was into it before wouldn't except any photographs for competitions unless they were over a certain memory size. Of course this meant that unless you had an expensive camera they didn't take a second glance.
Thanks for the info everyone. One last question, what would a RAW image be like if it wasn't edited? Can you just print it as it is?
Gaz - unless you have the software to handle it, you wouldn't be able to see it! I've never tried printing from one, but I doubt your printer would recognise it. I've just tried right-clicking on one of my RAW files, and the print option isn't there. See my comments above - get yourself a copy of Photoshop Elements 7, which is brilliant and costs just a fraction of PS itself. Or if you have PS, you can get various plug-ins for the older versions. Or there are freebie proggies that handle them, but the one I tried (Picasa?) was hopeless. Mike - the tutorials with the mags are great - a picture (or video) paints a thousand words ........... As per my post above, a fiver each month for a mag with free DVD is, IMHO, a cheap way of getting some decent tuition.
