AV News 174 - November 2008
RAW format is unprocessed and therefore retains all the original data captured
by your camera sensor without interference or interpretation thereby providing
the highest quality files; although larger in size than JPEG they’re smaller than
TIFF. RAW files need to be processed in your computer by a raw converter in
a wide-gamut internal colour-space where precise adjustments can be made
to colour temperature, tint, sharpness, highlights, shadows, contrast, exposure
etc before converting to a regular image format. Photoshop has its own
convertor called “Camera Raw” currently at version 4.4.1 this can convert raw
files to .tif, .jpg, .psd or by default to .dng (Adobe Digital Negative). DNG is a
publicly available archival format for raw files which in simple non-technical
terms stores one single format from the multiplicity of RAW formats currently
available. DNG is supported by Photoshop CS, CS2, and CS3, also Photoshop
Elements 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0. Hasselblad and Leica already support this format
directly as do a few other camera manufacturers.
The Camera Raw convertor will open automatically when opening a raw file
within Photoshop, or when double clicking a raw file within Adobe Bridge. You
can make a remarkable amount of (non-destructive) adjustments before
converting to your chosen format, or opening into Photoshop for editing
preferably working with .psd which of course is the native Photoshop format.
The last of our six formats is PNG (Portable Network Graphics) this type is
perhaps most interesting to AV workers because of its wonderful transparent
background capabilities. AV workers are increasingly using this format to
create movement within Pictures to Exe version 5xx, and of course Photoshop
can edit or convert images to .png format quite easily. However the merits or
otherwise of movement within AV is beyond the scope of this article.
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