raw pictures?

[andjayik]

Am buying a digital slr and noticed it can take raw pictures? Whats that? The best picture possible?

[Nuke]

In RAW pictures the camera doesn't do any processing. You have to upload them to your computer and process them there. Many cameras don't come with great RAW processing software, so third party is often best.

[mander]

This should also help although a long read. http://www.photo.net/learn/raw/

[Marsher]

What camera are you getting?

[andjayik]

minolta d5, what settings should i use, fine or extra fine?

[Nuke]

I would say extra fine if that's the highest quality setting.

Edit: It's easy to decrease quality later, but you can't increase it.

[Marsher]

Got to agree with Nuke... use the highest res you can manage in the situation and considering what your expectations of the pictures are....

If you are somewhere where you in a situation where you are liable to take a lot of pictures and do not have an opportunity to down load them you may want to reduce the resolution you are shooting at... it is better to to get a low res shot than no shot at all...but if you really want to be able to get a large print then shoot at high res.

[Bluvertigo]

Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d48e808e-b10d-4ce4-a141-5866fd4a3286&DisplayLang=en

[DazedNConfuzed]

so your spending at bare minimum a thousand dollars on a camera, and you don't even know of all things what RAW is?

strangely enough, enjoy your new camera.

edit - I love Bluvertigo's helpful links, I swear he has a link for EVERYTHING!

[andjayik]

paid 500$ AND USED 35MM IN THE PAST TIME TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW!

[Mike_Ottawa]

Actually, with my Canon Rebel, capturing in RAW format does require processing. The benefit to using RAW is that ALL information related to the shot is captured. Also, in the digital darkroom, RAW allows the user to work with 16 colour channels instead of the 8 provided with JPG (doesn't matter what resolution you're talking about). The next hurdle is to make sure that your software in the digital darkroom will work with 16 channels. For example, I use Photoshop Elements 4 and it supports some of the features that use 16 channels, but to use access all the features, I'd have to move up to the full blown version of Photoshop.

Hope this helps.