Working on my photos.

During a night out with friends I mentioned that I had been "working on my pictures" from a recent trip.  I realized later that night that none of them had any clue what that meant. As far as I know they all just use their phones as their cameras and post the jpgs they get from the phone.  So I figured hell lets make the 1st blog post in 4 years and talk about what "working on my photos" means.



I take my pictures with a Nikon D7200 DSLR. When you use a DSLR or a higher end camera you have options on how you store the picture you take. You can choose to save your pictures as a JPG, RAW file or both. A RAW file is the full data recorded by the camera images sensor with no processing or compression. On my camera a JPG will be about 9mb and a RAW will be about 35mb. My camera is set to shoot a JPG and  RAW file. Below you will see the JPG from the camera and a JPG I created from the RAW. As you can see without edits they look very similar.

JPG from Camera

 

JPG from RAW no changes

Edits is where the power of the RAW comes from. Apply some tweaks to exposure, contrast, White Balance,  and a few other adjustments and you get.

IMO, it looks a lot better and well worth the 5-10 minutes to get it there. Of course I take a few hundred pics on a trip so it takes a while to do them all.

Now that I've written the page, I think I need to reduce the exposure a bit on the final version.

Yup, thats better.