On 27 Dec 2004 at 13:59, David Zaninovic wrote: > What are the advantages of keeping RAW of a picture instead of converting > it > to a TIF file without any adjustments ? How can I > do no adjustments to a RAW file and save it as TIF ? So no WB or sharpening, > color saturation or any other settings applied. The only thing I would like > to > be applied is debayerisation and maybe hot pixel fixing. TIF should keep all > the > information that was in the RAW file except camera settings and other EXIF > information, I don't care about those anyway.
Just to further reinforce what John wrote is that inherent in the "debayerisation" process is sharpening and WB and contrast/gamma control. RAW files are far removed from the wide array of 3 colour per pixel image files that we are used to dealing with. In film terms it's like developing a latent B&W film image, you van chose any combination of developer and times/temps but once committed that's it, there is no going back, as would be the case if your RAW files were discarded. So we can think of RAW files being analogous to a latent film image, however they have an additional important advantage in that they can be re-processed without destruction. And in the case of post processing in Photoshop RAW all the settings are retained so that any subsequent re-processing will yield the same post processed file if there is no intervention (this post processing data can also be archived with the RAW files). They are smaller to store that the equivalent TIFF and they are able to be read with a multitude of very popular and likely long lived programs if you are at all concerned about archival potential. I personally now only archive TIFF files if I've needed to engage in any significant post processing outside the RAW convertor, which in many cases isn't necessary due to the flexibility inherent in the RAW convertor. I shot a lot of JPEG files before I secured some CF cards with decent storage capacity. Now going back to edit and print some of these images I regret not getting larger cards earlier. I would have felt exactly the same had I been shooting TIFF because it's the lack of flexibility in the RGB files that creates the problems. Is there a particular reason you asked the question? Also what you don't care about now (ie EXIF) you may care about later, it's always nice to have the ability to go back on a bad decision so to speak. Cheers, Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998

