Camera RAW - definition

A camera RAW is an uncompressed image format provided by many cameras or smartphone manufacturers so that the file can be stored in a lossless format. More or less all of us have seen the (.jpeg) or (png.) image format in cameras or smartphones. Because JPEG or PNG are the examples of compressed image format which is compressed or processed by the camera or smartphone manufacturer in such a way so that the light, exposure, color balance, and a few other things combined provide an output so that the user can easily use the photo without further edit or process to shorten the time of course.

But it has been observed in many cases the built-in JPEG or PNG compression engine doesn’t go well as expected. So, the professional photographers always use the RAW format so that the photo can be post-processed in their way and can get the expected output. A photo can be post-processed in several photo editing software such as Adobe Lightroom.

Several Camera RAW formats are: .ARW (Sony), .CR2 (Canon), .DCR (Kodak), .DNG (Adobe), .ERF (Epson), .NEF (Nikon), .ORF (Olympus), .PEF (Pentax), .RAF (Fuji), .RW2 (Panasonic)