Raw is my Green

Oh ye thronging mass of readers, pressed one against another, hoping to catch a faux pearl of knowledge. Hear me now. Hear me now.

So this blog post isn't about the next thing in dieting. It's tagged photography, fool! Maybe it should be tagged, photography fool. Anyway, here's the history. As soon as I learned what "green mode" on my camera was, I was horrified and disgusted. "You mean to tell me," I screamed in the direction of the rising sun, that birthplace of all quality optics; Japan, "this camera has aesthetic autopilot - and you actually insult me by suggesting I might need it? I curse you to the seventh generation!" The fist-pumping and spitting was just an instinctive impulse. You should have seen the look on the faces of the middle school graduates I was photographing at the time.

Your camera has green too of course, it's currently the spot your mode dial is set to. It's where your mode dial has always been set. Did you even know it could be turned? Maybe I should explain what "Green" is.

Some camera manufactures use different colors, but Green generally means "full auto." Which sounds cool if you're a rapper, or member of a militia, but a photog who shoots Green? It's a shame no one can recover from. You've opted out of being in control, instead you've let your camera pick the shutter speed, the aperture, and in some cases even the ISO. You want to, nay, you must get off the Green stuff!

 Now, Green has been a neglected spot on my dial for a long time. Long before I had a clue what I was doing. Well, ok, I'm still working on cluing myself in actually. And I admit, there have been times green mode would have resulted in an acceptable capture instead of a over/underexposed mess, but uh, yeah I guess it's just my prophet's pride that keeps me from twisting that little dial over to the Green square.

So what's a photo-dork to do? Easy answer: shoot raw. First, no one will accuse you of not being hard-core when you shoot raw. I mean, raw is more labor intensive to process, eats up more disk space (requiring you to carry more CF/SD cards), offers less guidance in post-processing, is a secret proprietary format, requires expensive or uber-geeky software to use... what's not to love! All those barriers mean you're on photographer who's in-the-know.

For those of you who are in-the-don't-know, I'll explain. RAW format files are basically unaltered data-dumps straight from the camera's sensor. There's a little processing, but generally what you have in a RAW file, is the record of what photons, at what frequency, hit where on the sensor. This is (seriously) cool because no data is lost to compression or in-camera processing. Raw also makes no adjustments for white-balance, no sharpening, no adjusting color, no exposure compensation, no wonderful artistic filters. With some cameras the white-balance value and other time-of-shot information is stored with the file. But only stored with the file, not applied to it in-camera. In post processing you can choose to accept the camera's assessment or apply your own, the benefit again is that no information is lost - till you save your RAW file in a printable/viewable format like JPG, PNG, GIF or whatever. And as an added bonus to all those intimidating barriers listed above, you can fix your bloopers and mess-ups from not shooting green, or P for that matter, more easily when working with a RAW file.

All those uncompressed bits and bytes, just might hold enough information to allow you to bring up some detail in those underexposed shadows. Maybe that blown-out sky, has some subtle remnant of the clouds that looked "just like a pony!" This extra, subtle, information can be a shot-saver, as you are able to "pull up" that faint information which likely would have been lost in in-camera compression and processing. When working with under/over exposed images in RAW format, generally, one is able to regain a couple stops on both ends. Yes, you gain a couple stops on both ends and you get extra cool cache.

Try it out now, no one is listening, just say it quietly to yourself "Tsk, I've forgotten my DSLR even has a blue, err.. green or whatever... setting. It's just one of those features I never use. Like, oh I don't know, like art filters or saving as JPEG." Feels nice don't it? So there you go! You get to amp-up cool photographer blah blah by saying things like "Oh, I always shoot raw!" and, "Huh, I didn't realize a camera of this quality even had a green mode!" I'm sure you can come up with some of your own. Feel free to submit portraits (in RAW please) displaying your curled lip, your furrowed brow, or your eyes in mid-roll - whilst glaring at your mode dial, set on Green.