Question about RAW format

Started Nov 30, 2005 | Discussions thread
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Yoddle Laheehoo
Regular MemberPosts: 101
Question about RAW format
Nov 30, 2005

I tried to learn as much as I could about raw format on this forum, but yet some questions remain. Please bear with me.

I´ve understood that with raw format the WB, Ev, sharpness, contrast and saturation are not processed in the image data but are stored as information in the exiff data. I read that somewhere on this forum.

When I use the Olympus Master software, it starts "developing" the raw image I select. At that moment it takes the WB, Ev, etc information from the file and uses it to build the image so I can see it. Is this the same or a similar process that the camera does when it stores in jpeg?

At that moment, I can see the image, I can use the sliders from Master to change WB, Ev and the other settings to tweak the image until I think it looks the way it should be. At that moment I store is as a jpeg or tiff.

So, basically when shooting in raw format I am telling the camera "please capture the light or luminocity or whatever you capture from the CCD and store it together with the WB, Ev, sharpness, contrast and saturation values that you are set to or experience at this moment, but don´t dare process it as I´ll do that myself later on because I think I am better at it than you are".

So I shot two raw images from the same subject. All camera settings were identical except Ev, which I set to 0 at the first shot and to +1.2 at the second shot. Looking at the images in Master, the second one was brighter and had a histogram more "to the right". I can understand this as Master developed the images according to the exiff data.

Now my other question is, are the raw data exactly identical when not taking into account the exiff data? I´m asking for the following reason. Master lets me adjust for example Ev from -2 thru +2. That means that the image I shot at +1.2 Ev would be developed by Master at +1.2 and then it would give me another +2 to play with. Although it would be the same data as the first image I would have eV from -0.8 thru +3.2 as opposed to -2.0 thru +2.0 for the first one.

This then means that the "set everything to auto, just worry about the composition later" mindset is not entirely correct, because the extent to which the image can be processed later does depend on the camera settings during the time of the shooting. Or is this just the way Master handles things and does other software treat this differently?

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