RAW

RAW files are used by professional grade digital cameras to store images without processing them into a more common image format such as JPEG or TIFF. The characteristics of the RAW format that each camera writes tends to change depending on which component vendor a manufacturer has used for their device, this makes dealing with them using Digital Asset Management Tools quite complex. The main benefit of retaining an image in RAW format is that the conversion to a more universally recognised standard tends to lose at least some information (i.e. the quality of the reproduction degrades). In this sense, RAW files can be viewed as analogous to negatives in traditional photography. Because original RAW files are by their nature precious, sidecar files are used by some applications such as Adobe PhotoShop to store the changes made to them. Another format: DNG (Digital Negative) has been developed by Adobe as a Container Format for holding RAW files along with other types of data.