ACR, Bridge and Photoshop - A Master Class for Photographers ...

Section 1

Lecture 1: Adobe Camera Raw: A Brief Overview

Understanding what Camera Raw is or what a Raw file is and why it is different from a JPEG file important to know especially since you have spent all that money on a camera that is capable of shooting in that file format. A JPEG file is processed in side the camera at the moment you take the picture and because this file format is a compression format, you loose some of the quality right away. Shooting in the Raw format maintains all of the image quality but requires that you process the images on your computer. One of the major benefits of shooting Raw is that you can re-process that file again and again, differently each time without ever changing or destroying the original Raw file. Another benefit is if you shoot a traditional bride & groom and for some reason you over expose the bride’s dress, in JPEG that dress is blown out and the detail can never be retrieved but in Raw, we can recover up to 2 full f-stops of over exposure revealing the previously post details in the bride’s dress.