We’re not about to take sides in the camera wars. The following is about getting the best out of whatever camera you buy. Learn how to use your camera, consider shooting in RAW, send us profiled images for printing - and think twice before editing the images.

Shoot the best picture you can

There is a myth that shooting digitally means you can “fix everything in Photoshop”. This is not correct. An example is the notion that using filters is unnecessary. Filtering in Photoshop will degrade the image. You should make just as big an effort as you did in optical to get the image right in the camera.

MUNG

MUNG stands for Modify Until No Good!

It’s important to understand that, no matter how good the camera you buy, inexpert or inappropriate editing will destroy the files. Once a poorly edited image has been saved, its quality is gone for good and nothing anyone can do will get it back.

You’ll get lots of conflicting advice, but unless you intend to colour-correct your own images (something we recommend for experts only), we strongly suggest that you: 

• Get the colour temperature right
• Get the exposure right
• Apply the camera profile

And stop right there!

In the graphic, we’ve highlighted these functions in Adobe’s Camera RAW plug-in. This leaves almost everything untouched, but doing anything else risks degrading the files unless you're an expert.

TIFF, JPEG or RAW?

Each file format has advantages and disadvantages.

RAW offers unbeatable quality in the sense it records what the camera saw without any modification. For that reason, if you shoot RAW you should make sure you save the unedited RAW files. That way if the production files are spoilt down the line, you’ll have the pristine originals to start again from. RAW files vary from camera to camera, so you’ll have to convert to one or other of the following standard formats (although this is not hard).

JPEGs are very convenient because they are smaller and so more easily sent electronically and stored on disk or CD/DVD. (Depending on quality settings, an 18MB TIFF might save to a 2.5MB JPEG.) However JPEGs are “lossy”. The colour will change every time you save (JPEGs are illegal for this reason in forensics work). If you use JPEG format for its undoubted advantages, always save at the highest quality setting and save as infrequently as possible.

It is unlikely that your camera will allow you to shoot in TIFF format, but TIFF is a standard format that can be read by all the programs to be expected in a photographer’s workflow. It does not suffer from the quality problems that can occur with JPEGs. This is the preferred format for high quality work. However, TIFFs take up the most disk space. For example the sample RAW image shown in the graphic above takes 5.4MB on disk. Converted to TIFF it’s more like 14.5MB.

Choose the right working space

Using a small-gamut working space like sRGB in Photoshop can mean you throw away some of the quality you’ve tried so hard to capture. We recommend Adobe RGB (1998) instead. Your camera manufacturer is not likely to suggest you use sRGB, even though it’s popular with many Labs. Click here for more about working space.