I made a note of this in the last post about the free Photomatix export plugin for Lightroom but I thought it would be important enough to break it out to its own post.

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First and foremost, let’s recall that RAW is not a format nor an acronym, it just means (as illustrated in the figure below) the image file contains “unprocessed” data, “raw” from the sensor.

(figure above from photo.net)

Digital cameras outputing RAW have been around for many years now but some of the factors that made it cumbersome to work with RAW files were file size, proprietary RAW formats from different manufacturers unsupported by mainstream photo editing software, and very limited RAW editing tools. In the last couple years, however, Adobe and Apple (with Lightroom 2.0 and Aperture 2 respectively) have made a huge impact in streamlining RAW editing and making it a central part of the photographer’s workflow. (more…)

When Adobe released Lightroom 2.0 they also released beta versions of a number of camera profiles from different manufacturers with the intent of providing a more accurate RAW reading and interpretation for individual camera types and brands. The complaint from photographers has been that since ACR used the same default values for all RAW formats, not everyone was getting a decent image when first opened in ACR/Lightroom. (more…)