THE BASICS

Bring out the details in your photos

Capture images in raw format for finer editing.

Here’s how the iPhone camera normally works: you hit the shutter button and after the sensor captures the light passing through the lens, it’s digitised. The last step is the imaging process, which converts all of that information into the photo that you see.

But before that final stage, you can save the raw data – a record of all the light information that the sensors pick up. Compared to a compressed JPEG file, the raw format stores way more data, making it easier to adjust colour, brightness and contrast, all while maintaining high picture quality.

Knowing this, why not try out one of these raw photo editing apps and experiment with the image information to give your photos more texture and life.

When you’re editing a photo, there are lots of parameters you can work with, but let’s start with the basics.

Brightness lets you adjust the picture’s overall tone, while contrast controls the difference in brightness between objects in your photo. If you boost the contrast, the whole image will become sharper, but if you tone it down, the photo will appear softer. Shadows can alter the darkness of shaded areas, while highlights let you tweak the brightness of already well-lit sections. You can also change the blue-yellow and red-green scales by adjusting the white balance to help you get the colouring right.

You can do a lot of editing even on non-raw photo formats that have already been imaged. Just don’t get carried away. Editing too much can make the colours in your photo look unnatural and may even cause image noise or over-exposure.

But raw images don’t have these problems because there is loads more information than on a JPEG. This means more freedom to create photos that do exactly what you want them to.

All of the most precious moments in your life deserve to be recorded in as much detail as possible. And if you’re serious about that, the easy-to-edit raw format is the best way to go. So try it out on your next shot.