Phones do a good job of making photography as fuss-free as possible. Point, shoot, and send your best photos to the printer. What about editing though? Do you ever feel that when you try to edit your photos to improve their quality that the opposite happens, and all your edits do is deteriorate your image?
That’s because phones compress data to save on memory. Some of the quality gets lost the instant it is saved, usually as a JPEG file. The more edits are done, the more data is lost. Less data equals less of a professional appearing image. Dull, out of focus, possible pixelation and low contrast. Not ideal for a photo print.
To get the most data from a digital file onto paper via a printer, you need more data captured and stored. Not just the data that the phone software determines is important enough to preserve. That is what RAW mode is. RAW files are lossless and uncompressed. JPEGs are not. When you shoot in RAW mode, every piece of data captured by the phone camera sensor is preserved.
How to turn on RAW mode on your phone
Different devices have different settings. A few don’t have the option. To find out,
- Open your devices camera app
- Go to the Settings menu
- On iOS devices, tap on Formats, then turn on Apple ProRAW
- On Android devices, tap on Advanced settings, then Picture Formats and turn on RAW copies. This only works when shooting photos in Pro mode and it will save both JPEG and DNG files (Digital Negative)
On devices that don’t support RAW, there is the possibility of installing a 3rd party app.
.DNG files are Digital Negatives. The file format is supported by Adobe so editing can be done using Photoshop, which is available in all app stores.
RAW Vs JPEG – What’s the Real Difference?
RAW files have all the data captured by the camera sensor. No filters are applied, and the file size remains uncompressed. Because there are no changes made by the camera software, editing will be required. RAW files are best used by photographers, or those with a keen interest in digital photography. If you have no interest in editing images, don’t turn on RAW mode.
JPEG files are the standard file format for non-photographers who just want the simplicity of shooting a photo and having the option to print it. If you want the uncomplicated process of point, shoot, save or print, use JPEG. For advanced image editing, you’ll be able to do more edits with a .DNG file without losing as much quality during the image editing stage.
Printing DNG files
The .DNG file format is a negative that needs to be edited. Once the editing is complete, it will need to be converted to a file format that is compatible with print software. It is not a widely supported file format outside of image editing software. That is its intended purpose – for editing.
For printing, it will need a RAW conversion done to convert the .DNG file into a format that printer software can recognise. This will vary depending on your printer.
Some printers can take TIFF formats, which offer the best possible print quality, but because of their large file size, online print and frame services tend to have upload options for JPG, PNG, or GIF file formats, which have smaller file sizes.
Before converting your image for print, find out what file format your printer supports.
There’s no point in converting to a TIFF format only to have to convert it again to a PNG file. Each file conversion loses data. The point of shooting in RAW is to capture more data. Once your editing is done, convert it once, and then send it to print. That way, more of the preserved data can be transferred into the print, rather than lost to technical changes.