With most digital cameras there is the ability to store photos in "RAW" format instead of the standard JPG/JPEG.

When you take shots to be stored in RAW, the first thing you notice is that it takes a really long time for the cam to finish storing the photo after taking the shot.

The second thing you notice is that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to work with if you don’t have the proper software to read the RAW format.

The third thing you notice is that it takes seemingly forever to get RAW format imagery off the camera because it’s just so honkin’ huge in file size.

Is there any particular advantage to using RAW?

Yes and no. More on that in a moment.

What does RAW mean?

RAW is a "minimally processed" digital image stored on your digital camera when the shot is taken. You can think of them as "unprocessed" photos.

Is RAW the same on all digital cameras?

NO. This is because digital cameras of different makes have different ways of producing an unprocessed image.

Yes, this is confusing but it’s the truth. When you take a photo "in RAW", the actual data of the image is different per make. Canon is different from Pentax is different from Casio is different from Nikon is different from Olympus, etc. You get the idea. RAW is not a universal format.

How do I work with a RAW image?

Typically you need the software that came provided with your digital camera to work with them at all.

Granted, Picasa does support many RAW formats from different manufacturers, however its editing capabilities are very limited. Better to use the software that came with the camera.

What is the reason I would want a RAW image?

Best possible quality and most editing capability. The RAW file gives you more control over the final image - particularly for print purposes.

When would be a bad time to use RAW?

When shooting/storing in RAW it takes the camera a long time to save the file because each one is humongous. If you’re doing fast-style photography, RAW is a bad idea.

When would be a good time to use RAW?

Portraits, i.e. shots where you can take your time, RAW may serve a good advantage to you.

If you want to learn more about the technical stuff concerning RAW, see the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

Everybody needs to convert files from one format to the other from time to time. Luckily there are a lot of ways to accomplish this. One option I have just checked out is called Universal Document Converter.

In short, this product installs as a virtual print driver under Windows (sorry, Mac or Linux users). It allows you to print anything to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PCX, DCX, GIF or BMP. Probably where this would get the most use is when printing a Word document to PDF or when trying to convert a PDF to an image format.

I installed the freely available trial version. It will run indefinitely, but it will install a pretty large and annoying watermark onto anything that you print. The installation was nice and easy and, within a minute, I was able to run a test by printing off a webpage directly from Firefox. By default, it saves the resulting file to the “UDC Output Files” directory directly off your C drive. You can, however, change this in the Properties for the print driver. If you want it to ask you where to put it every time, you can also set this as an option.

The resulting prints are, as expected, true to form accurate depictions of what I printed.

The product most definitely does what it is supposed to do. The underlying question in my mind would be this: Do you really need this software?

Universal Document Converter runs $69 for a single user license, with volume discounts the more you buy. This certainly isn’t cheap for a virtual printer driver. Plus, there are free options available such as PDFCreator if PDF printing is your first priority. Printing to image formats is not nearly as easy to accomplish if you are trying to remain on the free side of things so it is in this arena where I see the most potential for this software. They have several tutorials available on how to run the various conversions.

Printing a document to an image format is probably something most home users won’t have a need for. However, it is not uncommon in enterprise environments where image formats are used for archival purposes for documents or for printing situations where you cannot have any alteration at all (we’ve all seen documents print differently at times than the way they appear on screen). It can also come in handy if you need to send a document to somebody without them being able to make any changes to it.

In that light, Universal Document Converter looks to be a nice option for the person who needs a quick and easy way to convert a document to a lossless file format, whether it be for archive or print purposes. It isn’t for everybody, but for the person who needs it it is a huge time saver.

NOTE: The preceding review was a paid review.