11.11.15 Shooting in the RAW mode | Digital Scrapbooking Words on Wednesday

Photo Fix Tip:  SHOOT IN RAW!  
The other day I was browsing my pictures from a past July…nighttime shot of playing with sparklers and saw this:

I was so bummed.  You could hardly see anything…and it’s not the first time I’ve messed up the exposure on my dark photos.  FORTUNATELY I’ve learned from my mistakes.  So when I’m shooting in low light situations (or other problematic exposure situations) I change up the settings on my camera.  I “shoot in RAW mode”.  This means instead of saving the photo as a JPEG, it’s saves the photo data in a different way (different camera brands have their own extension…but we’ll call it RAW).  My camera will save it both ways simultaneously, & I like that mode best.

So…I opened up the same RAW photo & tweaked the numbers…mostly the EXPOSURE and got this:

Woot!  So then I created this:

SO…check out your camera manual…learn how to shoot RAW (if your camera can) so the next time you are in the dark & your exposure is off, you can save the photos!

ps.  Why don’t I ALWAYS shoot in RAW?  Well…
#1.  My last camera could either shoot raw OR jpeg (not both), and I could only view the photos if I brought them into the Adobe converter…a LOT of work just to look at my photos.  But now my operating system can preview both jpgs & raw files, so that’s not so much a reason anymore…
#2.  RAW files are relatively HUGE compared to jpegs.  In the picture above, the jpg is 3MB and the raw is 8MB, so when saving both, I was filling up my SD card VERY fast.  Um…I upgraded my SD card (the old one was 5 years old…and it was big back then…) so now that’s not so much of a reason anymore either….
Guess I should switch back to RAW+JPEG again.