Cooked
sophisticated French philosophy
t o gr
o
h
(Left) Fell End, after rescue in raw format (Right) Recovery and Blacks are the sliders that
retrieved the off -the-edges bits of the histogram
raw or RAW?
Since I’m being such a good Structuralist, I’m delighted to point out that there’s no such thing as RAW format.
‘RAW’ doesn’t stand for Reproduction As Was, or anything else: it just means ‘raw’. And you won’t ever fi nd a fi le
coming out of your camera called IMG_102347123.RAW. Instead, every camera has its own unique and personal
way of recording its unprocessed data. IMG_102347123.DNG from a Nikon, DSC00978.ARW from a Sony, and so
on. If your editing software is slightly younger than your camera, then it’ll cope. If not then, very possibly, not.
Adobe has a generic raw format called DNG for ‘digital negative’. There’s a free converter, which can change
even the weird .RWL fi les from an early Leica digital into .dng. Quite likely the dng will then open in your favourite
picture-botherer software. If not, perhaps in Photoshop.
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The meal, on a winter evening at the Green Dragon (Wensleydale) was perfectly cooked. But the
photo of it – given the tricky lighting and the bleached-out outdoors – that was better taken raw.
summer 2019 | Outdoor focus 11