Alrighty, my fellow photographers! On this edition of “I wish I knew then…” I will be chatting about the power of shooting in RAW! For almost my first year in business, I shot in JPEG — Nothing else. It was absolutely fine. There are TONS of amazing photographers who ONLY shoot in that format. However, I WISH I’d known about RAW from the BEGINNING!

When my friend Daniela told me about it I was blown away! I learned the basics that I will describe below just from toying around with photos and watching youtube! And this year I took an editing class with Winnie Bruce, and she went more in depth! (HIGHLY RECOMMEND HER WEBINAR!! www.winniebrucephotography.com)

I love it, and I will never go back… and this is why:

I photograph a lot of families. I also photograph a lot of families in the great outdoors, where lighting can change every few feet, and little ones speed up and sloooow down. SOMETIMES, I want to capture that quick moment, but am not quick enough to change my settings in my camera to get it the way I want it. My goal is definitely to nail my shots straight out of camera! But life happens! lol and with JPEG files you can only fix so much. However, if ya shoot in RAW, the chances of saving that image are pretty great, because you have greater control in post processing..  And for that, I LOVE IT!

NOT ONLY is it awesome editing in Adobe Camera Raw to salvage images that may have been compromised due to not having time to change a setting or an unexpected change in light, BUT it has also cut my editing time down by HOURS. INSANE.

With ACR, I can bulk edit all the basics like exposure, white balance, highlights, contrast for a series of photos (pictured below)… And then I pull them in PSCS6 and add some artistic flare. Bada bing bada boom.

Here is a quick example. Cora was first in a much brighter area, and there were patches of light on her from the trees above… So, I asked to move her into a more shaded area where the light wasn’t splotchy. Since she is ONE and I knew the time on her back was VERY limited, I didn’t bother wasting too much time adjusting my settings. I knew I was pretty much exposed, and she was in focus, so I kept rolling.

Fixing the minor mistakes was a BREEZE, thanks to shooting in RAW 😉

There is a lot more to the power of RAW beyond this blog post. I encourage you to research or take a class to learn if you haven’t already, bc it is pretty AMAZING 😉

I hope this was a good starting place for you!