The Power of RAW!

Since bitten by that bug, i've been taking some pics here and there. As we all know, digital imaging software is also progressing by the light years together with the cameras that are produced. To be honest, even with all that geekiness in me, i dont really play with photoshop or paintshop pro or wadsoeva. Yes i did play with them quite some time ago (proof of my geekiness) but i never really liked them because

1) Their program is laggy and huge AND COMPLICATED. 

2) I'm too lazy. 

3) My picture look worse than when it is unedited. Which is usually the case for me and it has been sceptical for me since i touched those program. 

So since i was bitten by that bug now, i figured i shall just check out what they do normally to make pictures look nicer.. they say that curiosity kills the cat.. BUT i'm not a cat... at the very max, i can only be a mosquito due to my name but not a cat.. so curiosity crept in. And lo and behold, i discovered something called the RAW format. how noob of me. 

Here is a picture of a pretty girl in a nicely diffused background with nice colours and all. Normally i would just look at it and go, wow! quite a nice picture.. but then if it is blown up to quite a bigger size, things would be different. and from my crappy experience with digital imaging, this would probably be the best image that the camera can produce and any altering will lead to grains, noise and those ugly stuff that makes your picture worse. 

So after reading a bunch of material regarding histograms, tonal range and blah blah blah, i decided to try it out myself by shooting RAW formats on the SLR. They always say that RAW can preserve this larh, that larh and result in lossless color correction etc etc. i always take them with a pinch of salt because my eyes tell me that JPEG looks as good as the RAW that i shoot when i look into the LCD. And if i do anything to the image on processing, things will go wrong.. 

Initially when i blow up the picture in my screen it really does look a tad uninspiring. When it is still small like above it can look quite alrite and acceptable but when blown to about 5R size there's a distinct warmish color cast and the whole picture just look flat. So after tweaking with the white balance, tonal range and the exposure, together with some curves adjustments, i got the shock of my life...

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I couldnt believe my eyes actually until i click another button to compare them both... well in my honest (even though noob) opinion i really think the latter picture looks more striking in colors, and with better contrast and exposure. so THAT is how RAW format can do. and there you have it.. even a noob photographer like me can do something like that without using photoshop.. just some basic color correction and exposure adjustments... how cool is that..