One of the great things about digital photography is the Menu on your camera. Most point and shoot photographers don't want to mess with details. They just want to point and shoot. So the menu is more of a menace than a help. But inside the menu is a host of settings and preferences that can enhance your photo shooting experience. I'll try to cover some of more important items that you should pay attention to within your camera's menu, starting today with Image Quality. Your camera manufacturer might have a different name for this, but basically it is where you choose the compression level of jpg: usually something like Fine, Normal, and Basic; as well as whether you want to shoot jpg vs raw.
Most people have a familiarity with jpg files. Jpg is what we usually use for getting prints, posting photos online, or emailing to each other. A jpg file is a compressed file. In other words, you take a photo with your camera, your camera takes all the information associated with that image: the exposure, white balance, sharpness settings, saturations settings, etc; and then the camera's built in computer interprets that information, determining which information should be saved and which should be discarded. In the end you have a processed image. Now depending on what setting you had for image quality, your final image will either be lightly compressed (Fine) to heavily compressed (Basic). The primary difference between these settings is the physical size of the file. Depending on your camera, a Fine image file might be 3-5 mb in size, while a Basic might just be around 250-500 kb in size. These settings came in handy when memory cards were only 250 mb in size; but today with cards of 8-32 gb in size, there is no excuse for shooting anything less than Fine.
The "Fine" setting retains the most information your camera can give you with a jpg file. The more information you have (the less compression) translates into an image that you can than print larger. If you plan on bringing the image into Photoshop or some other image program to play with, you definitely want to use an image with the highest resolution, that being a Fine quality file. I always recommend that people set their image quality to the highest resolution possible. You can always resize an image downward if you need to, but if you shoot with the image quality of Basic, you end up with an image that has been severely compressed and degraded right out of the camera. There is very little you can do with this kind of image, other than email it or look at it on your iphone. If your photos ultimately don't mean anything to you, then set it at whatever image quality you want. But if you are shooting images with the intent to save and archive and possibly do something with them, then by all means shoot at the Fine image quality.
Now all the previous info had to do with jpg files. On most serious cameras you will also have the option to shoot a Raw file. A raw file is a data file. In a sense all images start as a raw file. When you have your camera set for jpg, you are telling your camera to take all the information, interpret it on its own, then spit out a compressed jpg file. With a raw file, you are asking the camera to just save all the captured data and not to process it. With a raw file you will end up with a great deal more information. In fact a raw file will end up being several times larger than a fine jpg file. Personally I like having all that information. If I am going to spend time composing important shots, I don't want to randomly lose important information from each image. Raw files not only keep all the information, but it keeps that information separate. A jpg file, when it gets compressed, basically mixes the exposure information with the white balance information and all the other information. So when you open the image in Photoshop to tweak it, when you change the exposure, you are also affecting the white balance. With raw, when you change the exposure, that is all you are affecting.
So what do you do with a raw file, and why would I want to shoot raw files over jpg? I guess I should first of all say that there are many professional photographers who shoot only jpg, and they are fine with that, and that is fine with me. It seems though that there are more and more photographers who are shooting raw files. I think beyond having more information to work with, the main reasons people shoot raw is because it gives them more control in the processing decisions of an image, and they feel they can sort through and edit images quicker with a raw software program than they can with jpg files. Of course if your idea of shooting again is simply point and shoot, you probably don't want to mess with your photos after they have been captured. So jpg would make more sense. But if you want more control and plan on going through your images to edit anyway, then raw might make more sense.
There are several raw software programs on the market today. Probably the most widely used are either Adobe Camera Raw (found in Photoshop), Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Apple Aperture. Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom are essentially the same engine. Lightroom is specifically geared for photographers, is raw specific, and is not just a raw processor but also good for managing your images, composing slideshows, and printing. Aperture likewise is a full featured program. I personally use Lightroom. I find it the more intuitive program, with more flexibility to fine tune your images. There are plenty of places online where you can learn more about these programs. You can also download a 30 day demo to try it out.
I am a big fan of raw files. Raw processing has been the focus for many photographers today. Some are able to do all their image work within a raw program and never need to open it up in Photoshop. If your camera has the ability to save your image files as raw, give it a try. Most higher end cameras give you the ability to save your images as both raw and some form of jpg, so you can have both worlds. Don't be afraid of raw. Give it a try.
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