Advantage Raw Files

Seattle Skyline, originally uploaded by Gamut's Edge.

Today I dug through some of my Seattle photos from a week ago. This one seemed worthy of editing and uploading to istock. Lately I have been shooting in jpeg format because my hard drive is bursting at the seams. When shooting Seattle I shot in raw because I figured the night time photos would require a lot of editing and raw would offer more flexibility

While completing the edit work on this file I realized why I like shooting in Raw.

1) Color correction in raw is easy. The raw conversion dialog box in Photoshop is faster and easier to me than creating a color correction layer later in the edit.

2) Using raw you can keep the image in 16 bit mode for the entire edit. When I open a raw file I make sure to open it in 16 bit format (check the box at the bottom of the raw converter to open in 16 bit mode). A normal jpeg is an 8 bit file. Editing in 16 bit means there are less rounding errors/changes for each photoshop adjustment you make. 16 bit files seem to hold up a lot better when I do heavy duty edits.