Imagine a Tuscan landscape at dawn.  The light is soft and vineyards zig-zag across gently rolling hills.  Mist hovers in distant valleys.  If you’ve visited Tuscany, you’ve seen exactly this.  How breathtaking.

There’s billions of things for your eyes to take in, the subtle differences of the colors and their softness, the pinkish light beginning to peek over the mountains, and your camera’s sensor captures this image with millions of zeros and ones!  How clinical.

Your camera is not your eye, and it cannot capture exactly what your eye sees.  Two actions can be taken to help capture more of what your eyes see.

First, always capture your images in RAW format.  The resulting RAW file contains all possible data that your sensor is able to read, thereby providing your post processing software with much more data to work with.  Compare file sizes next time, it’s approximately a 5:1 ratio for RAW-to-JPG on our Canon 5D Mark IIs.

The photo replayed on the rear of your camera body is a JPG.  In order to show you that image, your camera translates from RAW to JPG, and in so doing, applies your Picture Style settings.  Your specified Picture Style could be one of your camera’s pre-defined settings such as Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, or Monochrome.  These settings control whether your JPG conversion is vivid, sharp and crisp; nice skin tones with a softer image; vivid blues and greens with very sharp and crisp images; monochrome, etc.  You can also define your own conversion by customizing a Picture Style.  You do this by adjusting sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone.  This process is well covered in your camera’s user manual.

If you were you able to see your RAW image on your camera, as you would in your post processing software, it would look dull and lifeless compared to the actual scene.  However, the data is there, it is just waiting to be extracted by you during post processing.

So, always capture your images in both RAW and JPG formats.  You will use the JPGs out of your camera for informal viewing of your photos, and you will ALWAYS use the RAW files for post processing.

Second, fight the urge in the field to say, “oh that’s okay, I’ll correct it in post.”  This is a much talked about subject, and here’s our opinion...

Correct for everything you can in the field and get it built into that virgin RAW file.  Use your ND and GND filters, use your polarizer, and use your histogram!  If you do, you will no longer say while posting, “gee, those clouds looked a lot punchier in person”, and then waste time trying to get them to look that way.