Many high-end digital cameras can capture images in the RAW format. You do this by choosing the option from your camera menu. The camera does not process images captured in the RAW format. Instead, you get the image that the camera image sensor recorded, which therefore gives you richer colors. If your camera can capture images in the RAW format, a utility to process the images and save them as TIFF or JPEG files was included with your camera. To process the RAW images, install the software and follow the software instructions to process your RAW images. The following steps show a typical workflow for processing RAW images:
- Launch your RAW viewer utility. Your utility probably has a method for you to preview thumbnail images of the files.
Open the image you want to process. This will take some time as the utility decodes the file into a viewable image. The following illustration shows an image being processed in the Canon File Viewer utility. Notice the graph in the upper-right corner of the image. This is a histogram, a graph that shows the distribution of pixels from shadow areas to highlights. If the graph is flat on the left side of the histogram, you don't have enough detail in the shadow areas of the image. If the graph is flat on the right side of the histogram, you're lacking detail in the highlight areas of the image.
If necessary, increase the exposure of the image, as shown in the following illustration. Notice the difference in the histogram when the exposure is increased. If the image was too bright (a large spike at the end of the histogram), you may be able to recover the image by decreasing the exposure.
Continue processing the image by adjusting the contrast, color saturation, and sharpness. The next image shows the contrast settings in Canon's File Viewer Utility.
After adjusting the desired settings, save the file. Your application will give you conversion options, such as those shown in the following image, which are the options for converting a file using Canon's File Viewer Utility. If you're going to further edit the image in an application like Photoshop Elements, choose the TIFF format, 8 bits per channel (because the current version of Photoshop Elements does not support images with 16-bit color depth).
Don't delete your RAW files after processing them. RAW image files are like film negatives. You can reprocess them as needed to create new images. Archive your RAW image files to a CD for future use.
