The RAW War

09/02/08

When I "went digital" in 2003 it was with a great deal of apprehension, not because of any fear of technology or change, but because coming from a professional printing and processing background I had seen digital photography slowly kill my trade and felt somewhat guilty of betrayal.

However, having seen the quality and workflow benefits of digital I realised I would be foolish not to embrace digital and sell my film gear. This is why I have always found it slightly odd when people who have not had film technology pay the mortgage for 10 years find digital an insult to photography.

I assume that they think it’s not "real photography" because it’s all done in the computer - you can no longer believe what you see on the print.

Well, you haven't been able to believe what you see in print since photography was invented. Everything from choice of viewpoint, aperture, shutter speed and filtration, through to film stock, processing temperature and times, & printing choices have a huge impact on the final image.

No, I believe peoples distrust of digital has sprang from the fact everyone now has the ability to see the photograph right through the entire processing pipeline. The dark arts that were once hidden in the confines of a darkroom are now available to everyone through their PCs.

Some people believe they are being true to the original image if they shoot film and not digital, scan the film in and match it to the original slide. No they are not. They are being true to their film manufacturers colour, saturation and contrast settings for their chosen film stock. Why match the print to some arbitrary film manufacturers’ version of a scene they (the manufacturer) never witnessed? No film has the ability to record the detail, colour or dynamic range the human eye can.

Some people with digital cameras believe if the shoot JPEG or tiff and do no processing in PhotoShop that they are being true to the original scene. No they are not. They are being true to their camera manufacturers’ saturation and contrast curves settings.

It is true that you can choose an appropriate film stock to suit the conditions (although when I used film I, like most other colour landscape photographers, stuck rigidly to Velvia - a heavily saturated, contrasty film stock), or alter the colour and contrast settings for your JPEG's in camera, from flat-as-a-pancake contrast to eye-shattering colour settings, depending on camera; but these settings are global - they affect the entire image, and most images require local contrast and colour corrections - different parts of the image requiring different amounts of exposure, contrast and saturation.

Because of this it is almost impossible to produce an image direct from film or digital without it needing at least a helping hand to get the most out of it, especially if the image is to be printed.

Darkroom workers had traditionally been these helping hands (throwing their arms around like a loon under the enlarger lens as they "dodged and burned"!) but now we have the much more sedate PhotoShop and Lightroom, where we process our RAW files.

This brings me onto RAW files, and why they’re so useful.

A RAW file, as its name implies, is the raw, unprocessed information from the cameras sensor. Because it is unprocessed some people have compared it to a latent negative. But it is superior to film because it has no saturation or contrast curves already embedded in it and also if we don’t like the result we can process again.

This is of course not an excuse for sloppy camera work to begin with. In the ‘good old’ days before digital imaging, photographers would compose the image, meter accordingly, taking into account the contrast range and using filtration if necessary to correct for colour and contrast. This would give the best possible negative or slide with which to work with in the darkroom. The same is true with digital photography – the file should contain as much information as feasible to produce the best possible print. Underexpose and the shadows will be ugly and noisy when lightened – overexpose and you will blow the highlights, meaning the detail is lost forever.

Ansel Adams invented an entire exposure system, called the zone system, based on pre-visualizing the finished print before even pressing the shutter. In essence the zone system is about placing an image within one of 10 "zones", from paper white to pure black, to obtain the maximum tonality in a given image. By adjusting the camera exposure, negative processing times, choice of printing paper and tailoring his darkroom technique for each individual image, Ansel Adams produced some of the most stunning prints in the photographic world.

I think some photographers maybe never realised the extent to which the hand printing (and printer!) contributed to the substance of a photograph. Professional photographers would often work very closely with their chosen hand printer to make sure their vision was realised.

With raw processing we mere mortals can try to achieve this without screwing up the processing of the film or wasting sheets of printing paper by developing, tweaking and re-processing the digital file if necessary then viewing the results on screen before printing.

This leads me to the major benefit of digital over film photography - repeatability.

- The way digital images and film images are captured by a camera is virtually the same (i.e. a light tight box with a lens and light sensitive material).

- Both film and digital images often require local as well as global contrast and colour corrections. (Photoshop, PaintShopPro etc.)

…but once those corrections are performed on a digital image (or scanned film for that matter) they can be saved and then output exactly the same time and again (very difficult with film in the darkroom if dodging and burning techniques have been used) either the same day or years down the line.

This, all other cost & quality benefits aside, is the main reason why digital could well win the war.