Unlike most amateur cameras, professional cameras have the ability to shoot photos as jpegs (useful for the internet, Facebook, etc.) or RAW (images that contain all the information that the sensor in the camera can pick up). RAW images make the best enlargements, although they take up so much space on a card in the camera or on a desktop that they can be unwieldy.
I always shoot RAW just in case I’m fortunate enough to capture an image that is so good that I would either want to sell it, print it, or, simply make it look as good as I can make it.
All images can be adjusted by software, but in the case of RAW images, the photographer’s ability to make the most out of an image is only limited by the software. As improvements take place in software, RAW images that were processed by inferior or older software enjoy a second life.
And so it is with Adobe’s Lightroom, perhaps the most useful and comprehensive software editing program. Recently, Adobe introduced a new tool called “enhancement” that can only be applied to RAW images taken with a few cameras, one of which is my Nikon D 850. Here is an image processed in Lightroom. adding the enhancement feature, which Adobe claims improves the RAW image as much as 30%.
Of course, how good it looks also depends on your computer, phone, or iPad screen. I currently have 69,173 images stored on my computer, all of which can be enhanced by Lightroom better than they could have been last year, the year before, or 2003 when I first bought a digital camera.
Some photographers pour over old images, knowing that they can be improved. I confess that I occasionally do that, too. But for me, I’m primarily interested in the next image. It’s the shooting itself, the hunting, what photographers call “captures” that I live for. I have a formatted card in my camera. I’m ready.