A “normal” camera will store pictures in JPEG, files that end in .jpg. At that point, the file contains image information about that exact picture, the result of all the camera’s processing. When shooting in RAW, it doesn’t save the processed picture, but rather the data that the camera captured. This means that things like white balance etc isn’t permanently applied to the picture, but can instead be changed afterwards. It can of course not do anything with the focus, shutter speed or anything that is a result of a physical setting in the camera and affects the picture hitting the sensor, but it can change what the camera did to the picture after it hit the sensor.

The Canon 1000D which I have unfortunately won’t save RAW files when shooting in any of the “idiot modes”, which are the automatic shooting modes. I don’t know why, maybe to save people the hassle of understanding what it is, but it’s a bit annoying because I often shoot in auto mode if I don’t have a lot of time to test settings beforehand or just want a snapshot. Of course, in those instances I don’t really need RAW. As for my panoramas, that includes so many photos that I don’t want the hassle of fixing the RAW files before stitching. That leaves single photos that I take for the sake of being “artistic”, where I use manual modes and can do RAW. I shot one such photo during the weekend, and since I’ve never played with RAW before I decided to see what it could do.

I won’t go into details about what I did with the above images to make it go from the first (“before”, straight JPEG image) picture to the last (“after”, RAW image edited in Adobe Camera Raw) picture, as frankly I just pulled levers until I liked what I saw. The point is that the RAW picture ended up looking much better, because of the extra freedom RAW gives you. You can of course process JPEG files and improve them as well, but think of it like improving a cake; it’s much easier if you have the recipe instead of just the basic baked cake to work with.

I’ll have to play with RAW a bit more but so far I like the extra tweaking it allows you to do. It’s an extra step for each shot though, so it’s definitely not for snapshots.

Original JPEG

Processed RAW

I got a tip from someone at ABi to try out ArcSoft PanoramaMaker, which is payware. It worked the first time I tried it, but subsequent stitches have been buggy and in some cases way off. It seems to be unnecessarily slow and very inaccurate, especially with pictures involving water. The final fail that made me try another app came today when I wanted to stitch 30 pictures into one epic panorama. The result that the ArcSoft software spit out after 10 minutes of working was this:

I don’t know what planet that is supposed to be, but I don’t think gravity exists on it. I then went to download Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) which is a free app that is supposed to do the same thing. After working on the exact same pictures for about a minute, it popped out this:

The full cropped photo measured a whopping 114 mega pixels, so I scaled it down to a 32 mega pixel photo that you can access by clicking the picture above (right click and open in new tab to circumvent the shadowbox popup). ICE handled it all perfectly, unlike ArcSoft’s epic fail. I knew there had to be some difference between the various software solutions, but I had not idea the difference was this big. I will of course use ICE from now on instead of that CrapSoft thing.