According to Uwe Steinmuller and Jürgen Gulbins, one of the most important steps for demanding photographers occurs between shooting the image and image processing or manipulation. It occurs with the conversion from the raw format into images of a standardized format. The Art Of RAW Conversion focuses on how to prepare files for conversion and how to set up an efficient conversion.
Although the authors agree that Photoshop may not be the best solution for all image operations, they do focus on Photoshop for much of this book. In addition, they do describe other image converters as well.
The Art Of RAW Conversion is divided into 14 chapters and two appendixes. The goal of this book is to provide a workflow to help you work through taking the photos that you shoot through conversion, manipulation, printing and archiving.
So what is RAW conversion? Many cameras allow you to save in either RAW or some sort of compressed format such as JPEG or TIFF. When the camera saves your file in a compressed mode, it throws out data to save space on your digital storage device. If you are using this image on a website or to create a four-by-six inch picture this may not be a big deal. If you ever want to enlarge this picture, you will find that your picture is lacking in clarity and the sharpness needed to create a good enlargement. By taking your picture in RAW format and converting it to JPEG or TIFF, you can retain the original elements of your picture and convert to the needs of the moment.
In The Art Of RAW Conversion, Steinmuller and Gulbins begin by introducing you to RAW files or what have come to be called digital negatives. They explain how in-camera conversion works and how to work with general camera controls.
They then proceed to color management and profiling. This chapter is an overview and serves well to enlighten you on this topic if you are not familiar with it. Color management it too big of a topic to cover here and not the focus of the book.
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