I just bought a new 9 megapixel camera and I need to understand what RAWSHOOT is. Can someone explain it to me

Question

The camera is a Fujo FinePix E900. I'm really trying to learn some basics of digital photography. This is my third digital camera. I started out with an HP315,the went to an Olympus Camedia and now I have the Fuji.

Answer 1

RAW files are uncompressed. They contain the information as captured by all 9 million individual photosites on your sensor. With jpg images, this information is compressed.
It's like turning a music CD into mp3 tracks. You save disk space by discarding 'unnecessary' information.
Sometimes however, you want all the information you can get. With tricky lighting conditions, or if you're about to take a shot you might want to blow up to poster size, the extra information in RAW files CAN make a difference. Those are also the only two occasions where I personally use RAW.
If professional wedding photographers are anything to go by, they mostly claim that if you get the exposure correct, jpg will be good enough.

Answer 2

If you are trying to learn the basics of digital photography, set RAW aside for a while and learn your own camera and formats. RAW is something that you are going to have to get serious about if you want to learn it. It's my "next big project." I've been into digital photography for about five years now and never touched a RAW file. It is as close to creating a fully detailed original negative as you can get using digital photography - if I understand it correctly. If you do not do your own processing using Photoshop or something similar and if you do not have the right software to open your particular brand of RAW files, you will not benefit from shooting in RAW. In fact, there are many pros (according to PopPhoto) who just dont' see the advantage as long as they shoot in the highest resolution JPEG format - for most situations. As long as you dont' have some kind of extreme lighting condition that you just can't correct for in the original exposure, you will have to a lot of work to realize the benefits of RAW. (unquote) I still want to know more about it myself, as I am a control freak.

Answer 3

The only thing I can say is basically its the largest file size and highest quality setting. The files can be around 20 MB for one picture!!Basically it uses all 9 megapixels of your camera and the images are uncompressed.Raw as in nothing done to the pic at all.

Answer 4

RAW FILE is picture file type which you can do some editing prior to saving it as JPG or TIFF or whatever picture file your camera allows.

Just like raw meat...you do all marinating and stuff before you cook it and is ready for consumption.

RAWSHOOT will let you take pictures so you can do any edition you wanted, be it cropping, zooming, color change, file type change.