Okay, maybe some of you who do not have a camera that is able to save the RAW format, I own a Nikon L11 for snapshots. And my Sony Ericsson mobile phone can not save images as RAW, only 5 Mpix JPEG.

But in case you have the option to save as RAW, you should avail yourself of it - Or, as Nike's advertising says - Just do it!

I use a Nikon D70 (6Mpix images) and all DSLR cameras are able to save pictures in RAW. The main difference between the RAW and JPEG is that RAW is 12bit (and in newer cameras 14bit) and JPEG's 8 bits, which means you have less information in the image when saved as JPEG to RAW.

"But my RAW files are so big"

Yes, it's a valid reason, and I must admit that each file only take up 700KB instead of 5500KB (approximately 7 times the size), is a factor to consider. Especially if you have a 12 or even 25 Mpix camera.

But hard drives are now down to a price of 95 € for 1 TB, such a disk could handle about 150,000 of my RAW files, and with a decent NAS you could keep all your images in a secure RAID. But more on that in a later article.

But using RAW, there's actually a chance you'll begin to sort all of them are blurry, underexposed or has the wrong white balance - because now does size matter. My archive of old pictures taken with my first digital camera (Canon Photo Shot S10) has several hundred pictures that should be deleted. But I've kept them because they only take up about 0.5 MB per file.

"But I think my pictures look fine"

If you have experienced to take 10-20 pictures of your children, only to find out that the last time you enjoyed yourself with your camera, you have made a bad attitude and now they have a bluish tint?

Here's one of my old pictures:

A slight blue tint

Just root around with Adobe Camera RAW ..

.. and a pinch of Photoshop

The first picture taken with my Powershot S10 back in 2002, and you the way you experience a "small" bluish tint, the camera was probably set for tungsten (normal indoor lighting), but was taken outside. On the second picture, I used Adobe Camera RAW to change color in the picture, and the last I used a Hue / Saturation layer in CS4 to adjust the color of my sons winter clothes and the color of grass.

Had I taken a picture with a camera that supported RAW, I could just have changed the white balance from tungsten to cloudy, so my problem had been solved.

The end result is not the wildest, but better than the first.

I will continue in the next section to show what you can actually do with your RAW files.