Adjust your camera work to capture better-quality RAW images
One of the interesting aspects of professional photography is how we tend to fall into a pattern of camera work that is repeated every time we go out to shoot. Since experience consigns many tasks to muscle memory, this can increase the consistency of your image quality and make your shoots more efficient.
However, on occasion, you may have found yourself cutting a few corners in this process to speed up your image turnover. Or you have become so involved in the subject that you forgot to follow your established camera ‘workflow’. It is useful, therefore, to occasionally check that you are still shooting in a way that will capture the best possible images your kit is capable of producing.
Many photographers are aware of techniques such as exposing to the right (ETTR), which is an excellent method of maximising the quality of your RAW files. As we discussed in our guide to mastering exposure in Issue 267, ETTR pushes the exposure to levels at which modern sensors capture an optimal level of colour and detail information, while tipping the signal-to-noise ratio in our favour. However, the ETTR method is often not performed to its full potential, because of a little-known quirk of most digital cameras. When you preview an image, it turns out that your camera is often lying to you.
All the professional techniques we learn to improve detail capture, such as ETTR, metering for the highlights and using the histogram, are all based on adjusting the exposure until the preview image contains as much detail as possible before the highlights are blown. The problem is that the preview image shown on your camera’s rear LCD screen is not the true RAW image, rather it is a jpeg preview.
You might think this irrelevant since you base your exposure on the histogram not the preview image. However, this too is a readout of the jpeg data, not the RAW. Therefore, when you reference the histogram and see that it is touching the right wall – which would seemingly indicate a loss of highlight detail – this might not necessarily be the case.
For this reason, to capture the maximum possible data in your RAW images, it is useful to learn exactly when your particular camera make and model starts to clip detail. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to accurately tailor your exposures in any lighting.
